Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

11. The Householder

VIDIA’S JOKE, early on, was that he would one day Anglicize his name, from Naipaul to Nye-Powell, and stride around Kensington wearing a floppy tweed hat and Norfolk jacket, brandishing a walking stick. Heigh-ho, I say! Jolly fine day, what?

“V.S. Nye-Powell,” he repeated, as though announcing a distinguished guest. He pronounced Powell “Pole,” in the manner of Anthony Powell, whom he knew well, and kept in touch with, and relentlessly patronized, in spite of the vast difference in age and class and (so Vidia believed) literary ability.

I loved hearing Vidia’s jokes. His laughter was a sign of health. It mattered more than anything that after ten years we were still friendly enough to swap jokes, or anything else. I could say what I wanted to him. What are friends for?

He also said, “People who see one as a little brown Englishman are making the biggest mistake of all. One reads it. One hears it. One is somewhat appalled.”

But what was he? Loathing self-definition, and especially hating the description “West Indian writer,” he wished to be appreciated for his gifts — who doesn’t? — but as an ethnic Indian it was his fate to be one out of many (the title of one of his stories): owing to his racial coloration, he was indistinguishable from the billion or so Indians in the world. Most Indians in Britain, a new class, lived simple, humble lives. Vidia on a London street was less likely a Nobel Prize candidate than a shopkeeper, the very dukawallah he despaired of: a London newsagent hurrying from the bank back to his shop, where he hawked cigarettes, chewing gum, and the daily newspapers, keeping the tit-and-bum magazines on the top shelf. That place was now a national institution, known throughout Britain as “the Paki shop.”

The most maddening thing for any Indian in England was that they were not called Indians but “Pakis”—short for Pakistani. Just as few English people troubled to make serious distinctions when they saw a brown face, Indians did the same when they saw a white one. Vidia celebrated himself as unique. He once spoke of his pleasure, years ago, in standing out and seeming exotic on an English street (“Recognition of my difference was necessary to me”). That was before the deluge. Now, purely on the basis of his physical characteristics, Vidia was no one — that is to say, just a Paki.

The idea of an address — a place of his own — preoccupied him, sometimes to the point of obsession. Not owning a house made him yearn for one. He always said he had no home, owned nothing, belonged nowhere. I surmised that his satisfactory but chaotic childhood — he is Anand in A House for Mr. Biswas, the novel that is the chronicle of his family — had given him no firm footing in Trinidad, and he often suggested that the Indians had been disenfranchised on the island.

His return addresses on letters were usually care-ofs and the poste restantes of publishers and agents. Sad, I thought. For years he had seen The Bungalow as temporary. He hoped for better, and he kept most of his belongings in a warehouse. But time passed and still he did not have a house. He was Anand in the book, but more and more he resembled Mohun Biswas, his hero, who longed for a place he could call his own.

I had bought and sold two houses in London, and so these days we talked more of real estate than of books. I was a property owner and he liked the solid practicality of that: no more hand-to-mouth living, the rented flat, the rented TV. Anyway, he seldom talked about books and was especially reticent about the one he happened to be writing, except to nod and say confidentially, but with noticeable astonishment, “I think what I am writing now is very important and has never been said.”

That he never mentioned my work I took as approval, not indifference. He now said, “You’re all right. You see?”

But property was on his mind. Place, too.

“Some snowy place. I see a cabin, a log fire. Boots.” He smiled at the thought. “I love the snow.”

He had written about the snow, always with the dreamy hyperbole of a person from a tropical island for whom snow is decoration — like icing on a cake — if not magic, weightless, crystalline, never having to be shoveled or driven through. But he had gone to several snowy places and had not liked them. Cross “snowy places” off the list.

For a few years he had fantasized about Montana. He liked the name; he imagined big skies, high mountains, dense forests. He did not know the “badlands” image. But he decided without ever going there that Montana was not for him.

California attracted him. He asked me for names, addresses, and telephone numbers of Californians who might show him around and also treat him to meals. He was a conscientious looker-up of people. He liked being met, enjoyed occupying the place of honor — where, of course, he belonged. My contacts served him. But he disliked California. He found that Californians cultivated the body but not the mind; he saw them as selfish and materialistic and smug.

He liked New York City. He liked New York humor and New York acceptance. No one stared at him in New York. He had once spoken of buying an apartment and living there for several months a year. But he did not act on this.

An islander, a country boy, as he thought of himself — though he had moved from his small rural hometown of Chaguanas to Port of Spain when he was seven — he said certain aspects of the Caribbean made him nostalgic to return: his memory of the cool cocoa plantations, the big shady villas with wide verandahs. The thought of disorder beyond the plantation gates, of the sort he wrote about analytically in “The Killings in Trinidad” and imaginatively in Guerrillas, kept him from ever making this move.

All these places were far from his English addresses: the not very distant county of Wiltshire, and London, which he knew well, having lived as far north of the river as Muswell Hill and as far south as Streatham.

“What did you pay for your house in Clapham?”

I told him.

“And what is it worth now?”

I guessed at its value.

“You see? You’re part of the market, you’re in the housing spiral. All the time I have spent chuntering and dithering I have been losing money. One should have bought something years ago. Just let it quietly appreciate. Then make one’s move. But one dithered.”

He was gloomy, feeling worse than houseless: he was placeless and a little hopeless.

“And you have a place in America?”

“A house on Cape Cod.”

“I don’t want to see it,” Vidia said. “It would just remind me of all the mistakes I have made in my life.”

There were large Victorian houses in Clapham, I told him. The inflated prices of Chelsea had not crossed the river. This made him smile.

“But, you know, one wants something fashionable,” he said. “Uncompromisingly fashionable.”

Kensington or Knightsbridge, he said. They were places that I associated with Arabic graffiti in different colors, and scrawled-upon posters, and no parking spaces, and Arabs dressed in galabiehs as though for the Empty Quarter, and businesses that catered to London Arabs: kebab shops, fruiterers, juice parlors, liquor stores, massage and escort services, and undisguised brothels. Every public phone booth was plastered with the explicit calling cards of prostitutes (“Young buxom blonde at your command”).

Instead of telling him this — which he knew — I made other suggestions.

“What about Chelsea?”

“Pretentious.”

“Lord Weidenfeld lives there.”

“I think you have just proven my point.”

“St. John’s Wood is fashionable, isn’t it?”

“St. John’s Wood, my dear Paul, is suburban.”

“Richmond is lovely. I’d like to live there, by the river.”

“It’s nice. People do live there. But it is suburban. And one would need a monkey wagon.”

The idea of buying a small car and riding up and down in it was just ridiculous to him.

“Mayfair must be the height of fashion.”

“Mayfair is corrupt. It’s a con. It’s full of prostitutes. I know Americans are glamoured by it, but I am sorry, Paul, it is not for me.”

“You’ve lived all over London.”

“Not really. Muswell Hill. The flat had previously been occupied by a Nigerian. It was unspeakable, but Patsy and I managed to disinfect it.” He made a face. “Streatham. I wrote Biswas. That was a wonderful period. Then Stockwell Park Crescent. Very modest accommodation, really. I have been a nomad.”

“You lived at Edna O’Brien’s house in Putney.”

“Briefly,” he said. “But Putney wouldn’t do. I want something fashionable.”

He found a flat off Gloucester Road, in a white Victorian canyon of apartment blocks with ornate façades, balconies, and Greek pillars. Queen’s Gate Terrace. It might be bad luck to talk about it, he said. He did not say much more until after he bought it.

“Come for tea,” he said, after he had furnished it.

It was tiny, the smallest habitable space I had so far seen in London. I came to realize that these imposing edifices had been intensively subdivided, so that what he had bought was a small corner — the pantry, the inglenook, the maid’s bedroom — of what had once been a roomy apartment.

The elevator was narrow; only two people could fit inside at a time. “I’ll walk, you ride,” someone would say, if there were three. If voices were audible, the language was Arabic.

“This is a bijou flat,” Vidia said. “This is my luck.”

He liked it for the neighborhood and, perhaps, for its odd shape and size. It was one small, incomplete room — a roomette — that was interrupted by half a wall and an entryway. One more step and you were in the kitchen, a one-person nook. The bedroom was up four stairs in a kind of loft that was filled by the bed. That was it: so small that, inside, you had to assume all sorts of economical postures, sitting compactly, standing with caution, no abrupt moves or you’d hit something. A russet Hokusai print on one wall, some small shelves, a bronze dancing Shiva. Everything had been chosen for its small size; everything fitted. But two people filled the sitting area. Out the one north-facing window were the backs of houses.

Vidia could be the greatest enthusiast. He was often depressed or low, but he was capable — as he said — of enormous happiness. When he had something he liked or had longed for, he was delightful to be with.

“You’ll have to dress fashionably here,” I said. “You’ll really have to change your name to V. S. Nye-Powell.”

“V.S. Nye-Powell, OBE,” he said, and laughed.

Having this home made him hopeful and confident. He said that his spirits were high when he was in the flat — it was his nest, as I saw it, and the way he described it suggested that he saw it that way too. It may have been small, but it was high and hidden. He felt protected. It was quiet. For a writer, any house or apartment is judged by how suitable it is for work. Certain places seem perfect for their silence and their light and for the harder-to-define elements of their feng shui.

“I see myself doing good work here. Something big, something important.”

Meanwhile, I was sitting on a chair so low my knees were under my chin, my hands folded. I was afraid that if I moved suddenly I would knock something over.

“Later, in a few years, if the market moves up as it has done, I will get something bigger.”

Happiness helped him imagine another flat — larger, roomier, just as fashionable — although “fashionable” was a word that always made me smile, because fashion was something the writer (irrational, rebellious, manipulative, innovative, as I saw myself and Vidia) turned his back on, or even attacked, for being the enemy of the creative imagination.

Vidia did not see being fashionable as conformist; he saw it as something else that put him out of reach. Being out of reach—“unassailable” was his word for it — was the most desirable position. He disliked being visible and proximate, within shouting distance. It eased his mind to be remote, a little mysterious and detached, while at the same time remaining at the center of things. It was obviously the reason he had rejected Montana in favor of Kensington. This was not a literary part of London. He knew no one here. That was a plus. It was disconcerting, if not vulgar, to be in a place where he could accidentally bump into people he knew: he had the manipulator’s horror of the sudden and the unplanned.

“I see Patsy giving lunches.” He was still talking about the larger flat he envisioned when he traded up, the one with many rooms. “And I am in my study, working.”

He was setting the scene, which was some years away. He is working on an important book in this big flat, and guests are assembling in the lounge while the table is being laid (by a devoted old woman in mob cap and smock, Wickett, an absolute treasure). Pat is in the kitchen supervising, or is she in the parlor pouring drinks? In any case, it is lunchtime, and Vidia is working in his book-lined study.

“And then”—he made a two-armed gesture of double doors opening, swinging apart, as he buttoned his jacket and made his entrance—“I go through to lunch.”

I wish he had been smiling, but he wasn’t. Nor was I, though at the back of my smiling mind I saw the master summoned from his study to a roomful of expectant and admiring lunch guests. It was the kind of scene I associated with Tennyson at Freshwater, or Henry James at Lamb House, or Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, the category of writer whom Larkin satirized as “the shit in the shuttered château.”

Because of this flat, I saw Vidia more often. That pleased me, because I had so few other friends in London. At the end of my writing day it was pleasant to get out of the house — my arms ached, my back was kinked, my legs were knotted from sitting too long. I rode my bike over Battersea Bridge and kept going north through Chelsea and Fulham to Kensington, where I chained my bike to the black railing outside Vidia’s white apartment block and listened for his voice on the squawk box: “Yes, yes.”

One day I happened to have a paperback jammed into my pocket. He noticed it and asked me what it was.

“The Go-Between. I’ve never read it before.”

Vidia suddenly remembered something ironic. I could see it in the set of his lips and in his eyes.

“Hartley was mad about the Queen,” he said. “Absolutely adored her. Then the day came — he is offered an OBE. He accepts it at once. His chance to meet the Queen.”

We were drinking tea. Vidia swallowed and smiled at the same time.

“All his preparations are made. He is in Bath. He hires a car and is driven to London in his morning suit — tails, top hat. Filled with excitement. Big day. His work recognized at last. The Queen awaits.”

Now Vidia was nodding, teacup in hand, and his posture suggested this was a moral tale.

“Hartley is at the palace. He is in the queue of people accepting their honors. The Queen approaches. Hartley is very nervous, but grateful. At last he has the Queen’s approval. She stands before him and glances at her note cards and says, ‘Hartley, yes. And what do you do, Mr. Hartley?"’

Vidia put his teacup down and lowered his head and looked humble.

’"A writer, Your Majesty.’”

And he laughed at the absurdity of it.

“As you say, Vidia, people should get their knighthoods and OBEs at the post office.”

“Books of stamps. Buy some each time and stick them into the book.” He made licking and sticking gestures. “Hartley was crushed, and I imagine it was a very long trip back to Bath.”

On another bike ride to Vidia’s flat, a few days after a riot in Clapham, I passed through Clapham Junction and saw boarded-up shop windows and looted shops; there was shattered glass in the street and dented cars. It was much worse than I had been told. The riot had started as a racial incident in Brixton and had spread up the High Road and across the Common to the Junction, where the rioters had converged and spent hours breaking windows and vandalizing cars.

I described the scene to Vidia when I got to his flat.

“That was not a riot,” he said. “That was a disturbance. Frightening, I grant you. But not a riot.”

“Hundreds of people. Angry West Indians.”

“Not angry,” he said. “Why would they be angry? They were jubilant. They wanted witnesses, and people took notice. They succeeded in destroying something. Windows, whatever. I suppose they stole some television sets.”

“It looked serious.”

“It’s all for show.”

“If that’s not a riot, what would you call it?”

“High spirits,” Vidia said.

He was afraid of mobs, he avoided large crowds, he did not use public transportation. But his general feeling was that it had all been done for cameras and publicity. If no one had taken any notice, nothing would have happened.

But when the riots — for they were riots and not high spirits — continued, Vidia was asked by a BBC news program to comment on the violence. He said all right, he had been thinking about it. The BBC would provide a car to take him to the studio, but Vidia said that such a trip was out of the question. With great reluctance, the producer agreed to come to Vidia’s flat with a camera crew.

I was at Vidia’s the next day while, smiling, he told me what had happened.

“There were three of them,” he said. “I must say, it was rather crowded. They wanted to get started immediately, and of course I had prepared my remarks. I wanted to talk about the excitement of this sort of affair, how it stirs people to see destruction and makes them spirited. I was going to quote from that lovely Louis MacNeice poem ‘Brother Fire.’ Do you know it? ‘When our Brother Fire was having his dog’s day / Jumping the London streets…’ It’s about London being blitzed by German bombs, the perverse thrill of someone watching it. It is perfect for what is happening now.

’"Shall we get started?’ the producer said.

“I said, ‘You haven’t mentioned money.’

“This clearly threw him. Money? But I told him I do not work for nothing, and that I must be paid. He asked me what I wanted. I said, ‘What you would pay a world-class doctor or lawyer.’

“‘I’ll telephone my department,’ he said. At the end of a very long call he said, ‘I can offer you three hundred pounds.’

’"Out of the question,’ I said.

’"It’s the best we can do.’

“I simply turned my back on him. I noticed that one of the crew was looking at my bronze of Shiva. I said, ‘Do you know how each arm is positioned in a particular upraised way and the whole figure gives the dynamic impression of movement?’”

I said, “What about the BBC?”

“They stood around for a while and then went away. I won’t work for three hundred pounds. The figure I had in mind was a thousand.”

“I wonder why they wouldn’t pay more.”

“Because they hold a writer in contempt.”

“But why did the man come all the way over, thinking you would do it?”

“Because he was a common, lying, low-class boy.”

“What about the others?”

“Epicene young men.”

He knew I was baiting him. He did not mind. He was glad to have a chance to vent his feelings. Pat tended to sigh or become fearful when Vidia fumed, but his anger was a loud broadcast of what was on his mind.

A writer must not let himself be presumed upon, he said. The TV crew had come and unpacked; the TV crew was sent away, having filmed nothing. A weaker person might have said (I am sure I would have said), “Since you’ve come all this way, we might as well do it. But this will be the last time.”

To relent in that way, Vidia would have had to break one of his cardinal rules, which was: Never allow yourself to be undervalued.

“Do lawyers allow it?” he said. “I say to these presumptuous people, ‘What would you pay a lawyer? What would you pay an architect, or a doctor at the height of his profession?’” On this subject he was unshakable. “An architect or a doctor would command thousands of pounds for a consultation. That is my fee. I am at the frontier of my profession as a writer. My fee must be no different from a doctor’s, or a scientist’s, or a lawyer’s. Anything less is an insult.”

Around this time, the first year of his little flat, the Public Lending Right movement had gained a following in London. The moving force was one person, the writer Brigid Brophy. The campaign called for a parliamentary bill to establish a government department that would determine, on the basis of random sampling, the number of times a writer’s books had been loaned from libraries. Using a formula, an amount would be worked out, and the writer would be sent an annual check. There would be a ceiling of about £2,500. Public Lending Right — authors compensated for library borrowings — was an enlightened scheme for which I became a strong advocate. In its early stages, signatures were needed to bring the idea to the attention of the minister for the arts. I pedaled up to Vidia’s for a signature.

“No,” he said. Never mind that it was a worthy cause. He hated petitions. And he could not bear to see his name on something he had not written. “I sign nothing.”

The push of his dignity, the force of his friendship, made me think of him vividly whenever I wrote anything. He hovered over my desk; he was the reader over my shoulder. His criticism had nothing to do with friendship. He might approve, but he was almost impossible to impress. Now and then he quoted a poem, but these were single lines. Really, there was not a living writer he praised, nor any dead ones he acknowledged as exemplars. I had mentioned his uniqueness, the apparent absence of influences, in my book about him, and was criticized for this by scholars and other writers. Perhaps I should have said his influences were minimal, and internalized to the point of their being untraceable. After a time, Vidia acknowledged his father’s writing as a strong influence. But he always said: You’re on your own.

Even knowing that he probably would not read what I had written, still he was the reader I had in mind whenever I framed a sentence. It gave me confidence to have his approval, but his approval was anything but casual. He hated inattention and intellectual laziness and received opinion. In conversation, he often said sharply, “What do you mean by that?” to the most offhand remark. When we were together I had his full attention, which was a demanding scrutiny. Usually I listened: I was Boswell, he was Johnson. I was still learning. I knew that I had to be at my best whenever I was with him, and that I got much more out of him as a listener than when I interrupted to argue with something he said. Challenge only infuriated him, so what was the use? He could be uncannily prescient, if not psychic, in some matters; at other times he was wrong and unfair and frighteningly intolerant.

Vidia tended to have something on his mind, always. While in England, as a householder, he did not get out much or see many people. He hardly talked on the phone. He ruminated when he was not working. World events and public people nagged at his solitary mind. In any encounter, he first fretted and explained what he had been thinking, whatever pent-up issue he had been worrying over during his long nights of insomnia. “This nonsense about South Africa,” he would say, and after that, with the matter ventilated, he could talk more easily. In his presence, my concentration was complete. Working alone, I was also intensely aware of his intelligence, and did not write a word without wondering what he would say about it, nor a paragraph without imagining his pen point striking through it (“I’m brutal, you know”) — even now, this one for example, ragged as it is.

“I am an exile,” he always said. In his own prim little flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace he said it more often, as though the flat were visible proof of the absurd delusion — and the settled belief of many foreigners in England — that owning property was the same as belonging. The more he became a householder, the stronger his sense of alienation.

Living precariously in rented places, his earthly possessions in a warehouse, he did not speak so often of exile; and traveling in India, the United States, the Caribbean, and frequently to Argentina, he did not seem to have the time to mention exile, either. He was on the move. But with a tidy and secure place in central London, and some of his goods at last out of storage — favorite prints and books, comfy chair, dancing Shiva — he said with more force and greater solemnity, “I have no country to call my own. I am placeless.”

Out of politeness, I did not mention that he was the one with the British passport, while I carried an Alien Registration Card. I drank my tea and encouraged him to go on.

“Exile is not a figure of speech to me. It is something real. I am an exile.”

After tea we sometimes went over to the V and A, a ten-minute walk, to look at the Mogul paintings. Vidia pointed out how some of those small lozenge-shaped portraits looked like the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard.

I still visited him in the country, at The Bungalow. One day he showed me an estate agent’s flier: a tiny snapshot of a brick house, some specifications (“in need of modernization”), and “To be sold at auction.” It was not far away, in Salterton, on the way to Old Sarum, nearer Salisbury, and seemed from the picture to be no more than a semi-derelict cottage.

“Pat’s going to bid on it.”

Auctions made Vidia anxious, even the picture auctions in London. I liked them for their surprising bargains. In his mind they were frenzied free-for-alls; the intensity unnerved him. It was so easy in bidding to get in over your head. Someone else always did the bidding for him.

But he did not want to talk about the house auction for another reason. Talk might jinx his chances.

Pat went and bid and was successful, getting the place for a relatively modest price. A long period followed during which the house was renovated. This was a real house, set in a sloping meadow. Vidia added a brick terrace with a balustraded stone wall, gave it a new tiled roof, a garage, a wine cellar, and new windows, double glazed so that he would never hear the cows mooing in the meadow or the overflying jets from the RAF base on Salisbury Plain. He landscaped it, enclosed it in high hedges, gave it a gravel drive and a steel gate. It was late Victorian, possibly Edwardian, very pretty, and because it was not at all grand, it looked like a home. It was called Dairy Cottage.

“People use the term ‘exile’ all the time,” Vidia said. ‘"Robert Lowell is an exile.’ But Robert Lowell is not an exile. The airfare from London to New York is a few hundred pounds. He is an American. He has a substantial house in New York. What does ‘exile’ mean in a world of cheap airfares? He can go home!”

Vidia was sitting on his sofa at Dairy Cottage, his legs crossed, smoking his pipe, the sun streaming through the windows. Crows in the sky were framed by the windows, an Emperor Jahangir portrait on one wall, another wall of books, a Hockney etching of a hairy naked man in bed.

“But I can’t go home,” Vidia said. “I have no home.”

India I understood to be an area of darkness for him, and England — well, no one became English, though they might acquire a British passport. But what about Trinidad?

“Trinidad, man — Trinidad!”

He had recently been there to write a series of articles about the trial of Michael X, a Black Power advocate convicted of murdering a number of members of his motley commune, including his white girlfriend. The plot was violent, race-driven, full of deception and sexual ambiguity and double-crossing.

“Cuffy has taken over Trinidad. Cuffy doesn’t want me.” He puffed his pipe. “But does Cuffy really know what he wants?”

This “Cuffy” was a curious word, obsolete, found in the older travel books in which blacks were in the background, and based on the name Kofi, a Ghanaian (Akan) word for Friday, given to a male child born on that day.

“Exile is something real to me,” Vidia said. He got up from the sofa and looked out the window, gloomily regarding his seven-foot hedge.

“This house is in a bower,” I said, to change the subject from “Cuffy.”

Halfway down a narrow lane that had no name — just a footpath, really — Dairy Cottage was entirely surrounded by dense shrubbery and low trees.

“Yes. A bower.”

He liked the word, and the idea. It was true. He had planted the shrubs and trees so as to create a blind and hide the house. Going past it on the Salterton road, you saw the newly tiled roof peak and no more.

Vidia threw open the double doors to the terrace, led me outside — probably thinking, Bower, bower — and explained his landscaping scheme.

“What do you notice about the garden?”

“No flowers?”

“Yes, partly. But more than that. It is green, all of it,” he said. “You see? Green.”

No flowers at all, none even in pots or planters. Flowers were a distraction and a nuisance and implied fussy attention. And they were a national obsession. It was an English thing to create a rock garden, an irregular slope of lungworts and fuchsias, pansies and pulmonaria, alyssum and lobelia straggling around mossy boulders. Such a garden as Vidia’s, all green, a mass of leaves, was unknown in the England I knew, and it might well have been unique. Who had ever crowed, “Behold my green garden"?

This monochrome was the opposite of the herbaceous border and the lily pond and the window box, the succession of rose arches, the climbing clematis and wisteria. Yet in spite of the single color, here were numerous different shrubs. Vidia knew each one’s name and characteristics.

“How did you decide to have your garden all the same color?”

“No, Paul,” Vidia said, smiling at my mistake. “Green is not one color. Green is many colors. It ranges from the palest pinkish green to almost black. There is enormous variation here, every possible shade.”

Hardly any grass, however, and no lawn to speak of. I remarked on this.

“True. Very little grass. No lawn. Part of my plan.” He smiled again. “I have a theory that it is exhausting for anyone to look at a large expanse of lawn. The viewer becomes tired reflecting on the effort that goes into cutting all that grass. A lawn is not restful to look at. A lawn represents great labor and noise, hours of rackety lawn mowers. A lawn is exhausting.”

Who would have thought that?

My blunder was in having brought him a wholly unsuitable red-leafed Japanese maple, a dwarf tree, as a housewarming present. Vidia was doubtful but thanked me, and he instructed an aged kindly man he called Budden to put the sapling into the ground. The deep red leaves stood out in all the greenery. How was I to know he had banned all other colors from his garden?

A few months later he reported with pleasure, “Your tree is not red all the time. Late in the season the leaves become greenish.”

Dairy Cottage was on its own, not near any other houses, not in the village, unmarked, no house sign, hardly visible, in its own green bower. To be remote and hidden was, in Vidia’s mind, to be safe.

One of the few snags was the jet aircraft from the fighter squadrons of the RAF base that constantly flew overhead. The planes engaged in surprising maneuvers, flew vertically, stopped in midair, tumbled, descended like helicopters, even flew backwards. Outside Vidia’s double glazing they were ear-splitting.

“I suppose Saudi Arabians and Chinese come down to see the fighter planes put through their paces,” I said. “The defense ministers.”

“No,” Vidia said. “Mr. Woggy doesn’t come down here.”

“But they buy these planes, don’t they?”

“Mr. Woggy stays in London. Mr. Woggy goes to an airfield near London for his demonstration.”

“So you don’t see them?” I could not bring myself to say “Mr. Woggy.”

“Mr. Woggy does not know this exists.”

He meant the meadow, the little river, the farm on the opposite hill, Wiltshire.

Most of Vidia’s possessions, everything except his papers, had been liberated from the warehouse and now furnished Dairy Cottage. Pieces of furniture I had seen years ago in his house in Stockwell had now reappeared, dusted and polished and gleaming, and pictures, and some artifacts from Uganda and India. And with all he owned surrounding him, in the comfort of his home, he returned to the old subject.

“I am an exile,” he said. “You can go home. You have a large, strong country. I have nothing. No home for me. Yes, ‘exile’ seems an out-of-date word. But for me it has a meaning.”

I went on visiting, pedaling from Salisbury station on my bicycle, uphill on the way to Vidia’s, downhill on the return. I kept my bike in the guard’s van and felt freer for having it. I loved taking it out on a spring morning, heading to my friend Vidia’s house past banks of bluebells, or later when the poppies were in bloom. At a certain bend in the road there were always pheasants flying up.

“I had a telephone call from America this morning,” Vidia said. “I picked up the phone and heard the voice. American.”

It was clear from his tone that the call was unwelcome, yet he looked serene.

“I did not say hello. I said, ‘Don’t ever do this again.’”

Vidia looked so pleased with himself, uttering this stern sentence of rebuke, that I started to laugh.

“‘Don’t ever do this again,’ and I put the phone down.”

Pat said, “I knew Paul would like that.”

Yes, because of the sudden hostility of the greeting and also because it interested me to know what anyone’s limits were, and particularly the limits of a friend. It helped to know what was deemed going too far. A stranger’s calling him was unacceptable.

“How did he get your number?”

“I have no idea.”

Vidia’s telephone number was known to only few people. His reasoning was this: a strange voice on the phone had to be someone asking a favor or importuning him.

“I want to be sure when I pick up the phone that the person is someone I know and like,” he said. “I don’t want to hear a strange voice.”

His wine cellar was almost full, and that collection was one of his oddest passions because these days he seldom drank wine, and when he did, it wasn’t much. He said wine gave him a headache. But each time I visited he showed me new crates and filled racks, he told me the vintages, he explained the complex flavors.

Walking past Dairy Cottage’s garage one day I saw a car. A car?

“Vidia, you have a car. What kind is it?”

“I don’t know. One of these little European monkey wagons.”

It was a brand-new Saab. It was green. I never saw him drive it, nor did I ever see it outside the garage.

Time passed. He bought another flat in London, much bigger than the one at Queen’s Gate Terrace. This flat was off the Brompton Road. It was the sort of place that suited his fantasy of the lunch, when he would be summoned from his study to meet his friends and admirers. He kept the little flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace. He continued to live in Dairy Cottage. He paid occasional visits to the new flat, sometimes wearing a floppy tweed hat and carrying a walking stick, and he wondered aloud how it should be furnished. And more than ever he began monologues by saying, with passion and sadness, “The word ‘exile’ has a meaning for me. I am an exile.”

12. My Friend’s Friend

VIDIA WAS PHONING from his flat, the tiny one — I could tell from the squashed acoustics, like a murmuring man trapped in an elevator: “Are you free for a coffee after lunch? There is someone I want you to meet.”

“Someone” meant a friend. Yes, I wanted to meet my friend’s friend.

It was the hot English summer of 1977. Even the London heat did not diminish my happiness, spending days in pure invention, writing my novel Picture Palace. In the voice of a smart old woman, Maude Coffin Pratt, I wrote about the contradictions of writing by describing the life of a photographer. I promised myself that after I finished the book I would take a long trip, as an antidote to the several years I had spent in novel-writing confinement.

Still, it was not easy to write on the hottest days in London. Open windows made it noisy, the slate roofs blazed with glare, the bricks became crumbly and overbaked. The very earth underneath the city shrank, because London is built on thirsty clay. Subsiding houses began to split and crack, jagged seams opened in the pointing, and the masonry over windows collapsed. It was the intense heat.

Londoners cracked too. Unused to the heat, they became skittish and self-conscious and dressed more sloppily, and there were more of them on the street. You saw women in parks stripped to their underwear, sunning themselves, grinning at the sky. Bare-chested men with pink arms competed for space with tourists, who kept saying, “We expected rain!” People were generally merrier, but it was the wrong city for sun: not enough space, too narrow, only a few public pools, and they were dire. The city had been made for work and indoor pleasures and pedestrian exertions in big parks. It was unusual to have so much sunshine, and there was no way to use it — only rented rowboats in the Serpentine, rented deck chairs in the parks at twenty pence an hour, and benches on the Embankment. The sun and swelter would soon become demoralizing, with nothing much to do except sit in it and drink pints of lager.

I saw these people all over; so many turned out that the traffic was affected. I went by bike in order to be on time for punctual Vidia: downhill to the river, uphill to the café near the Green Park tube station, where we had agreed to meet. Piccadilly was crowded with workers on their lunch break, smiling — even the people walking alone were smiling — because of the sunshine. Londoners habitually bowed their heads and hurried in the rain, but walked more slowly and much straighter in the sunshine, holding their heads up on days like this. You had to live through every phase of English weather to know the English traits: so many English moods and turns of phrase could be ascribed to the weather.

I locked my bike and looked around. No Vidia.

When he arrived at the café a few minutes after me, his face puckered in remorse, the energetic apology he made for his lateness was his way of reminding me that his standard of punctuality was as high as ever. I must not think from this single lapse that he was becoming lax. He still bluntly boasted of never giving anyone a second chance, especially someone who had been otherwise loyal; when a dear friend lets you down once, that must be the end. The relationship had run its course. A single instance of lateness might be all that was needed to fracture it. So I took his “Sorry, sorry, sorry” to be a scolding for both of us.

A smiling woman was with him. She was slim, about my age, thirty-six or so, and wore a fluttery light dress because of the weather. She had some of Pat’s features, the paleness, the pretty lips, the same posture and figure, full breasts — a taller Pat, the Pat of ten years before, but far more confident.

“Paul, this is Margaret.”

“I know all about you,” she said. “From Vidia.”

So this was my friend’s friend. Had she been a male protégé, like Jebb or Malcolm the New Zealander, I would have compared myself to her; I might have been anxious. But anyway, I was alert. Was she a writer? From your friend’s friend you understand your friend better and notice qualities you might otherwise miss — aspects of tenderness, humors, and responses. Always, no matter the sex, it is like meeting a rival lover.

We talked about tennis. Wimbledon was in full swing.

“I hate Wimbledon,” Vidia said. “I loathe tennis. It’s nonsense.”

“He doesn’t mean that. I taught him how to play,” Margaret said, and I thought she was pretty feisty to oppose him.

“I play sometimes,” I said.

“But you don’t make a fetish of it like these other people,” Vidia said.

“He’s simply being contrary,” Margaret said.

“When everyone was cheering Francis Chichester, Vidia wanted him to drown,” I said.

“Did I?” Vidia said, pleased to be reminded. “Did I really?”

“Who is Francis Chichester?” Margaret asked.

From that remark, and her slight accent, which I could not place, I gathered that she might not be English, yet she certainly looked English. I studied her accent as we talked about the weather — the sunshine, the heat. Vidia said it brought out the rabble. We ordered coffee at the bar and stood there, Vidia enumerating the errands he had to run that afternoon.

“I very much liked the piece you wrote about Vidia in the Telegraph,” Margaret said.

It was a portrait. I had thought: I will do what Vidia would do, write the truth, be impartial, let the peculiarities speak for themselves. He was an original, but it was annoying to read that word over and over. Better to be anecdotal and set down aspects of his originality. Some people had come to like him on the basis of the piece, others had said they found him insufferable, on the same evidence.

“I recognized him in it,” she said. “I have read so many pieces about him and never recognized him. They don’t ring true. But yours — even Vidia’s mother said she recognized him.”

Vidia was smiling a bit impatiently, perhaps because of this mention of his mother. He was devoted to the memory of his father, Seepersad, who had died relatively young, but had more complicated feelings towards his mother, matriarch of many Naipauls and still alive, a tenacious Indian widow in Trinidad.

I liked the praise, but I was still baffled by Margaret’s accent, the rhythm and intonation of her speech: the careful way she gave weight to each syllable, the manner in which her voice trailed off, the insistent, almost Latin way she spoke. Maybe she was Welsh-speaking? I didn’t ask.

“Your review of Guerrillas in the New York Times was also very good. Vidia was pleased.”

This embarrassed me. Vidia and I never spoke of the reviews I had written of his books. There was no need to. A review was not an act of friendship; it was a literary matter, an intellectual judgment. As Vidia himself said, writing a review meant having to reach a conclusion about a book, something the casual reader seldom did.

I said, “That novel really frightened me. It doesn’t happen often. But I was also scared by ‘The Killings in Trinidad’—the Michael X piece.”

“It’s scary stuff, man,” Vidia said.

“I thought it was too long,” Margaret said.

“What was too long?” I asked. It seemed a strange and even audacious way to describe the piece. I would not have dared say this. But she was his friend.

“Those articles. The New York Review should have made them a bit shorter.”

I glanced at Vidia. He was sipping his coffee, yet he had heard.

“And the woman in Guerrillas. She was so naive. I thought she was awful.”

“I think maybe that was the point,” I said.

She had dragged out the word, making it sound even worse: awwwwwwfool. Vidia didn’t blink, and I did not dare to smile.

Vidia said, “I won’t be a moment,” and headed for the rear of the café.

“So where are you from, Margaret?”

“The Argentine.”

“You live there?”

“Yes. In B.A.,” she said.

“I’d love to go there.”

“You must. Vidia’s a bit unfair about it, all this business about ‘a whited sepulcher.’ Really!” She had a beautiful laugh. “And you live here in London?”

“At the moment. I’m working on a book. I’ll be heading for the States as soon as my kids get out of school,” I said.

“The school year is so long here. In B.A. it’s much shorter.”

“You have children?”

“Three. But—” She was going to say something more, and thought better of it. She lost her smile and looked into the middle distance.

I said, “The place I like best is Dorset. I lived there when I first came to England. Do you know it?”

“No. Just from books. Thomas Hardy.”

“You’re pretty well read if you know Hardy.”

“Not at all. Vidia says, ‘You know nothing!’ And it’s true. What else do I read? Mills and Boon!”

“Sometimes Hardy is Mills-and-Boonish.”

“I don’t think so,” Margaret said.

“There’s that passage in Jude the Obscure where the heroine laments her fate.”

Margaret shook her head, smiled again, but in confusion. The conversation was moving too fast for her. She looked in the direction that Vidia had gone.

I said, “She says, ‘To be loved to madness — such was her great desire. Love was the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.’ Something like that.”

Margaret had begun to look closely at me.

I said, “And it ends—”

“It ends with a prayer,” Margaret said. And she said the prayer, enunciating it prayerfully in her foreign-sounding accent, clasping her hands: “‘O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.’”

“You know it.”

“It’s The Return of the Native, not the other one you said.”

“We must go,” Vidia said when he got back to us. He hesitated a moment, perhaps realizing he had reappeared at an important moment, yet he had no idea what had been said. He looked as if he wanted to leave, in order to separate us. He said, “Are you all right, Paul?”

“I’m fine. Working on a novel.”

“He’s full of ideas,” Vidia said to Margaret.

But the idea in my mind was linked to the long-ago letter in which he had written that a girl he’d met in Argentina had copied out two pages from The Return of the Native.

Back home, I got the novel out and read the passage again. It was longer than I remembered. I had marked the pages the day I received Vidia’s letter about the “coldest and meanest kisses… at famine prices.” They had meant little to me. They meant much more to me now.

After the sentences about kisses, it went on, “Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.” It continued, evoking Eustacia Vye’s yearning to be loved, and ended, “she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.”

The passage was like another of Vidia’s lessons in literature. The first time I read it, I thought only of Thomas Hardy; the second time, I thought only of Margaret in Argentina.

A year went by, and no Vidia, or very little Vidia. But in friendship, time is meaningless and silences insignificant, because you are sure of each other. Not at all weakened by the insecurities of a love affair, you pick up where you left off. And I was also Boswell, listening to Dr. Johnson say, “Do not fancy that an intermission of writing is a decay of kindness. No man is always in a disposition to write, nor has any man at all times something to say.”

He was away, then I was away. I saw Pat sometimes, and she apologized for Vidia’s absence, apologized for showing up alone; and I labored to reassure her that I liked seeing her, my old almost lover. She was more easily confused these days, got flustered over insignificant things she had forgotten, and she would struggle and sigh with something as small as extracting the right coins from her purse. The insomnia that had taken hold of her like a virus that would not let her sleep made her pale and gave her sunken eyes. Her face was lined and her hair had gone totally white. In her forties she became a little old lady and had all the fret and frailty of someone afflicted with a chronic illness. No matter how little her handbag or the parcel she was carrying — it could be as simple as a book — she looked overburdened, seeming to lug whatever thing was in her hand.

She came to dinner on her own and seemed frailer for being alone.

“Vidia’s away,” she said in a faltering voice. “He has taken one of those jobs in America at… would it be called Wesleyan?”

“Vidia? Teaching?”

“I’m afraid so.” Her smile was a smile of pure worry. “He’s awfully good and the people were terribly nice to him. And you know he gets standing ovations when he speaks sometimes — he did in New Zealand that time. But”—she paused and turned her pale eyes away—“he does get ever so cross if the students don’t do their work.”

I knew that “ever so cross.” It was purple, tight-faced rage.

“Do you have his number? I have to go to the States in a few weeks.”

It was the snowiest day I had ever known in New York, so snowy the city had shut down — stopped cold, brimming with drifts, no cars at all moving down Fifth Avenue, only people in the deep white street. Such conditions always made me think of Vidia’s saying, “I love dramatic weather.” He meant hail, high winds, monsoon rain, ice storms, snow like this.

New York was transformed. It was muffled and made natural again, silenced, simplified, made safer even, for in the worst weather villains and muggers stay home in stinking rooms and lie snoring in bed. The soft white city was beautiful and wild, the blurred mist-shrouded skyscrapers like the north face of a mountain range of glaciated canyons and ledges, where icicles drooped like dragon fangs.

Having just come from Vermont, I was dressed for this snow. I trudged to several appointments — though most businesses and offices were closed — and at noon called Vidia at Wesleyan.

A woman answered the phone.

“Vido, it’s for you.”

Veedo?

“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said in the old way when he recognized my voice. He was glad I had called, he said. He wanted to drive into New York. We could have dinner.

“What sort of car do you have?”

Always finding absurdity in technical description, he clearly enjoyed telling me it was a “subcompact,” and he repeated it twice, chuckling.

“Will it make it through the snow?”

“It will be fine.”

He was never prouder of his punctuality: he made it from the snowdrifts of Middletown, Connecticut, to Manhattan at the appointed time, six o’clock.

“Americans fuss so about the snow,” he said. “It stopped just after you rang. All the roads were sanded and plowed. The road crews are marvelous. People exaggerate the danger. I loved the drive.”

“You drove the whole way?”

“Of course.”

Dressed warmly, he looked more Asiatic, not Indian at all but like one of those tiny, flint-eyed nomadic descendants of the Golden Horde you see hunkered on horses in central Asia. He was alone. His hair was long and, as always when he was tired, his eyes were more slanted and hooded.

“I thought we might go to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central station,” he said. “I’m told it’s all right.”

“But let’s have a drink first.”

We were at my hotel on Central Park South, in my room. I had been drinking a beer when he arrived. I finished that one and was halfway through another. Vidia noticed.

“It’s the heat,” he said, defending me. “You need that beer because you’re dehydrated from the central heating. They overdo it here. And American walls are so thin you can always hear someone chuntering.” And he laughed, because I was opening a third beer. “Are you going to drink another one, really?”

I poured him a glass of wine. “How’s teaching?”

The tables were turned. Twelve years before, I had been the teacher and he the writer. He had warned me against teaching jobs. It was acceptable to travel to Singapore, but teach there? As you know, I disapprove of the means… A writer ought to have no job, no boss, no teacher, no students; ought to follow no one else’s routine; ought to have no masters, no servants. The essential point was that writing was not a job at all but, in his own phrase, a process of life.

I knew from eight years of slogging in the tropics that it was not possible for me to teach and also to write well. Many people did it, and some succeeded, but even when the writing was fluent, something was missing, because colleges were so far from the world. Vidia himself had taught me this lesson — Vidia now a poorly paid writer in residence and teacher of creative writing in a snooty college. He had recently given an interview in the London Sunday Telegraph in which he had said, “I would take poison rather than do this for a living.”

All this went through my mind because Vidia had not answered my question. He was frowning at his glass of wine.

“I didn’t know that writing courses were a soft option!” he said in a voice of mock astonishment, slightly overdoing it out of anger.

“Neither did I,” I said. “You’re a tough teacher, aren’t you?”

“Not tough enough,” Vidia said. “The students take my course because they want A’s without having to work. They seldom do the assignment. They hardly write. They lie to me. I try to goad them into work and they glare at me. They are deeply offended. ‘But this is a writing course! This is supposed to be easy! You are making us work!’”

He raised his hand in resignation, and sipped, and looked miserable. In the Telegraph piece, one of his students had described her reason for dropping out of his course: “He was simply the worst, most close-minded, inconsiderate, uninteresting and incompetent professor I have ever met.”

“That’s supposed to be a good university,” I said.

“They’re all corrupt. It’s all a con.” The students were lazy, the other teachers were inferior, the place was intolerable. His own mind was being damaged from being in close contact with people so inferior.

“What about the weather?”

“The weather is very nice,” he said. “Let’s not talk about the corruption. This wine is not bad. May I see the cork?”

Twitching the cork with his thumb and forefinger, he uncovered the details of the vineyard. He revolved the cork again, and again twitched the dusty residue, like an archeologist with a helpful artifact.

“California wine is vastly underrated,” he said, almost to himself, and then, “What brings you to New York?”

“I was in Vermont, visiting Kipling’s house outside Brattleboro,” I said. “I want to write about him — his American wife, his American residence, the way it ended.”

“And how did it end?”

“In a huge kerfuffle. His drunken brother-in-law threatened to kill him. It was just bluster, but Kipling decided to bring a case against him. His brother-in-law was popular, a good old boy. Kipling was regarded as a snob and an interloper, a limey. It ended badly. Kipling went back to England and sulked.”

“He was immensely famous,” Vidia said. “Immensely famous.”

“I think it would make a terrific play — the arguments, the rivalries, the court hearing, all that. I have a transcript of the case. And he was writing The Jungle Book at the time — you know, the law of the jungle.”

“It’s a lovely idea,” Vidia said. “Very attractive.” He brooded a bit. He sniffed the cork.

“Shall we eat? There are some restaurants near here that aren’t bad. An Indian one near the Plaza.”

“Let’s try the Oyster Bar, shall we?” he said with a note of insistence.

We walked out of the hotel and the fifteen blocks to Grand Central station, all the while marveling at the silence. By now some streets had been cleared, and a few taxis moved slowly through the whiteness.

“I have an idea for a play,” Vidia said. “Raleigh is sixty-four, in Guyana. He has been let out of the Tower so that he can find El Dorado and redeem himself. It is a risk, and now he has found himself at a dead end. But he can’t admit defeat. He is old and lost.”

He told me the story of Raleigh on the Orinoco, the play he intended, as we kicked through the snow.

In the light of a building entrance, a woman stood waiting in an area that had been shoveled. She wore a fur hat and a coat with a fur collar, so her foxlike face was framed by the soft pelts, the warmth of fur and skin. She turned away from us, not wishing to make eye contact, and just as we passed, an important-looking car swung to the curb and she rushed to it, seeming relieved.

“Did you see that woman? Pretty, don’t you think?”

When he did not answer me, I took his silence to mean that I had asked a silly question. But no, he was thinking.

“All women are built differently.” He spoke slowly, as though delivering a piece of news.

Closing his fingers, like a man plucking fruit, he made a scooping gesture with his hand. I took “built” to mean something more complex than their shape. He was suggesting contours, not an interior mechanism peculiar to each woman; he was implying something more urological.

“But you knew that, didn’t you?”

It was pleasant to be in a big city with him. We were both free, the snowfall had given New York a holiday, emptied of people and most cars. So the city was ours.

And after all these years I never took this friendship for granted. I felt lucky to know him, privileged to be with him, blessed for all his good advice, cautioned by his mistakes, stimulated by his intellect, enlightened by his work. I was aware of his contradictions. More than anything, I was inspired by the dignity of his struggle. Writing tormented him, he suffered through each book. And where were we now? I was thirty-six, he was forty-five, we were both working hard. I was writing a play and contemplating a trip to South America, and he was teaching — though he had said “Never be a teacher,” here he was, a creative-writing teacher in Connecticut. There could be only one reason: he needed the money. Our positions had been reversed so dramatically, I had to be careful not to wound his dignity by mentioning it or saying to him (as he had said to me so often), “You teachers make lots of money!”

We walked along — he was thinking about Raleigh, I was thinking about Kipling — and we told each other that these were great ideas.

The reassurance, the intellectual vigor of his friendship, made me happy. What perhaps mattered most was the trust, the mutual compassion, which was also forgiveness, and the fact that we understood one another. By now we knew each other well and had arrived at that point at which friends realize they cannot know each other any better, His friendship was a pleasure and a relief.

I was still reflecting on “All women are built differently” when he said, “So you see, we are seriously talking about whether the president of the United States knows how to read a book!”

“Jimmy Carter?” He must have been gabbling about Carter while I was thinking.

“Yes. Does he know how to read? I have seen no indication of it.”

“He talks about Dylan Thomas a little.”

“Oh, God.”

The philistinism of the U.S. government occupied us for the time it took to travel the short distance east from Fifth Avenue to Grand Central. We descended the stairs to the warmth and light of the Oyster Bar — not busy, another casualty of the blizzard.

We ordered. We talked. We drank. We ate. Vidia kept returning to the subject of Wesleyan. It was corrupt, a con, a cheat, the soft option of writing courses, the laziness of students.

“It’s crummy, man. Crummy. I should never have come.”

“Why did you?”

“I believed they were doing some good. And the pence, of course.” He made his rueful face. “But, you see, I have only myself to blame. I broke one of my rules.”

From time to time he lifted his eyes to look behind me, at a table where some people were speaking excitedly. I thought he might go over and tell them to shut up or stop smoking. But he was considerate: just a glance and then we kept talking, now about New York writers and how they were self-regarding. Vidia saw New York writers as shallow, cliquey, and envious, uninterested in the world, needing local witnesses, frenzied, not even very bright.

“I have my students reading Conrad. They don’t know him at all. They read — who? Kurt Vonnegut? But they respond to An Outpost of Progress’ and The Secret Agent. Some nice things in that.”

“I used to teach it in Singapore. Winnie’s a good character.”

“Of Winnie, Conrad says, ‘She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.’”

“I also used to have the students read your Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. I love that book.”

“You’re so kind, Paul. You know, I am assigning my students your Family Arsenal, for its depiction of London and bombers — excuse me.”

Interrupting himself as he looked up, he went to the table behind me while I held my breath and prayed that he would not make a scene.

When I looked around, I saw three people sitting at a table, sharing a bottle of wine, not eating, but all of them smoking cigarettes. A man and two women, and one of the women was Margaret from Argentina.

“Hello.”

She smiled and raised her glass. She looked a bit tipsy and rumpled. I had last seen her on a hot day in London, wearing a summer dress. On this freezing night in New York she was blotchy from the cold air and wore a thick dress. Her hair was windblown and damp. Yet with all this dishevelment she was as pretty as ever — perhaps prettier, the way some women look when their clothes are slightly awry, a blouse untucked, a button undone.

I got up to speak to her, and when I approached she introduced me to the others, her brother and sister-in-law. Vidia said nothing.

“How about this snow?” I said.

“Vidia adores it, but it makes life impossible,” Margaret said. “We live so far in Connecticut.”

Vidia said, “Paul, this has been splendid, but I think we must be going. We do have a long way to go. Margaret?”

“Just a minute.”

“Shall I see to the bill?” Vidia said, a trifle wearily.

“No. I’ll get it,” I said.

“Oh, good.”

Margaret frowned at him.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.

Once again, Margaret and I were together, but unexpectedly. I gave the waitress my credit card.

“It must have been quite a ride from Connecticut,” I said.

“I did the driving. Vidia hates to drive.”

Really? But I said, “If I had known you were here, I would have asked you to join us.”

“Vidia wanted to talk to you. You’re his friend. You never quarrel!”

“That’s us. Dos amigos,”

“Claro.” She laughed. “He has the students reading your book. I don’t know which one, I’m afraid.”

“I used to tell my students to read Mr. Stone.”

“It’s one of his books he doesn’t like.”

This was news to me. “Which others doesn’t he like?”

“Suffrage of Elvira. A Flag on the Island.”

“I thought he liked those. And Mr. Stone’s a little masterpiece.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

Seeing Vidia hurrying towards us, I thought of asking him: What was it that he didn’t like about these novels of his? But it was late and they were leaving, and I was the wiser for seeing my friend’s friend materialize in this distant place.

We said goodbye in the snow outside and I left wondering, but also feeling profoundly that some things do not stand much looking into.

Later that year, in London, I visited him at his tiny apartment and we had tea. Pat was in the country, at Dairy Cottage. I did not mention New York, or Wesleyan.

“I’m going to South America,” I said.

“I am thinking of going to the Congo,” he said.

“A travel book?”

“Not exactly that. Call it travel with a theme.”

I said, “I’m planning to leave my house in Medford, Massachusetts, and just take trains, heading south, until I get to Patagonia.”

“It’s a delicious idea. I know you’ll do it well.”

“I’ll be spending some time in Buenos Aires,” I said. He did not react, and so I went on, “I don’t know a soul there.”

“Really.”

“Or in Argentina, for that matter.”

This seemed a natural inquiry, because Vidia had been to Argentina many times over the past seven years, had written about it extensively — about Borges and Evita and the culture of politics and terrorism. He had been fierce in some of his statements: “There is a certain ‘scum’ quality in Latin America. They imagine that if you kill the right people everything will work. Genocide is their history.” But he was frowning at me now, as if I had mentioned a place that was foreign to him.

“Do you know anyone there I might meet?”

“There are so many fraudulent people there,” he said. “Stay away from the ones that wear white shoes. And the ones who wear wristwatches that light up.”

“I was thinking of particular people I might call on.”

He thought hard. At last he said, “No. No.” And he stood up. Tea was over, the visit was at an end. He said with a trace of bitterness, “You’ll be all right, Paul. You’ll be all right.”

I took my Patagonia trip. I wrote my book. He took his trip. He wrote his Congolese pieces — journalism. After a time, he wrote a novel, A Bend in the River, set in Africa, about an Indian there who has a passionate affair with a married woman. And he wrote something else. I saw it listed in a bookseller’s catalogue, a privately printed book called Congo Diary: “In a limited edition of 330 copies. Three hundred are numbered, twenty-six lettered, and four bear the printed name of a recipient.”

Mine was not one of the printed names. I bought copy number 46 for $200. It was signed by Vidia. The dedication was “M. M.”

13. Death Is the Motif

BROTHERS are versions of each other, a suggestion implicit in the word itself, the “other” in “brother.” Seeing Shiva Naipaul was always an oblique encounter with Vidia, as though I had bumped into someone similar, not an identical twin; the rough draft, not the finished article.

Brothers are like that. The wit in one is craziness in another; one is an original sculptor, another is “good with his hands,” a third is a klutz who drops things, and a fourth might be a brutish criminal, even a destroyer. Three or four flawed prototypes for the man of achievement. You discern the thin one in the fat one, the artist in the con man. What are the roots of this variety, so many exotic blossoms on the same stem? No one knows their past; and the brothers resent the blurring of these convergent echoes and resemblances, because such resemblances can be so misleading.

The history of scribbling brothers is full of conflict, which ranges from hurt feelings and petty grumbling (“Why does he get all the attention?”) to vicious attempts at literary fratricide (“Take that, you bastard!”). One of the brothers is always the other’s inferior. Look at the brothers William and Henry James, Oscar and Willie Wilde, James and Stanislaus Joyce, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Anton and Nikolai Chekhov, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell — there are no intellectual equals here, and, being writers, they are borderline nutcases.

Such brothers are often fratricidal from birth and babyish in their battling, for there are nearly always aspects of lingering infantilism in sibling rivalry. When brothers fight, family secrets are revealed and the shaming revelations often make forgiveness irrelevant — the damage is done. In the literature of sibling rivalry, an enthralling spectator sport but pure hell on the fraternal rivals, the cry is usually “He hit me first!” or “Choose me!” It is also typical for one sibling to feign an utter lack of interest in the other; inevitably you end up admiring one and pitying the other. The larger family — the cause of it all — winces and tries not to choose sides. The nicer-seeming brother is not necessarily the better writer, nor even necessarily nicer.

Shiva Naipaul never had news of his brother, and was insulted if you asked: they seldom met. In the way of a brother, Shiva’s presence rang bells like mad and was full of reminders of Vidia — turns of speech, Trinidadian eccentricities, Hindu fastidiousness, and chance remarks that at times added to my understanding of Vidia; but in the impatient and rivalrous manner of a brother, Shiva more often obscured it, even undermined those insights.

Meanwhile, Shiva protested his love for Vidia, yet he said his brother had hurt him. “I had vulnerabilities he did not always find easy to understand,” Shiva wrote in an essay, “My Brother and I.” “For a long time there was mutual distress.” That was putting it mildly, and “distress” was a Vidia word, an understatement he used often to indicate outrage or fury. There was anger on Shiva’s part, indifference — or disparagement — on Vidia’s.

“Shiva was raised by women,” Vidia had said. He repeated this formula often, shaking his head at the imagined damage from female attention.

More softly and with feeling Vidia had also said, “When my father had his heart attack, Shiva found him alone. My father was dead. Shiva just stood there, frozen, mute. He could not speak.”

I saw Vidia occasionally, talked with him on the phone quite often, and corresponded. I bumped into Shiva all the time, never spoke on the phone, never wrote him a letter, nor did I ever receive one from him. This bumping into him characterized the randomness of his life. He said he didn’t make plans — that seemed a luxury to me. I felt I was overworked and stuck in a routine, but if I complained, it was dishonest of me — I liked the grind, I was happiest when I was writing, creation to me was pure joy. Shiva, echoing Vidia, said writing was misery. All the same, he could seem quite jolly.

I had run into Shiva in the middle of my period of financial uncertainty, in 1973—“I’ll take a trip and find a book to write.” It was to be The Great Railway Bazaar. After leaving the Punjab in Pakistan, I went to New Delhi. I met Shiva by chance in a guesthouse there. He told me he had flown to India. I said I had come overland on trains from London.

“God, how long did that take?”

“About five weeks.” I thought I had made pretty good time.

“Five weeks!” He sat like a pasha on cushions, smoking and drinking tea. His chubby cheeks shook as he laughed. “You’re a masochist.”

“Some of it was fun,” I said. “The Orient Express. Some of the Turkish trains. The mosques in Herat, in Afghanistan. The Khyber Pass.”

“Carry on, up the Khyber!” And he laughed again.

His mockery made conversation futile. It was nothing new. I always felt there was envy in his jeering, and I knew that if I jeered at him, he would be furious.

I smiled, defying him to mock. October in Delhi, twenty-five years ago. Two thirty-year-olds in a garden, each with a book in mind. He had a famous brother — he’d be all right. But if I didn’t bring home a book I was sunk.

“Why are you putting yourself through this?”

“A travel book,” I said.

“I didn’t think you wrote travel books.”

“It’s just an attempt. I need the money.”

“So you’re going to write about India like everyone else?”

“No. This is a whole trip. I’m going to Sri Lanka by train, via Madras. Then all over — Calcutta, Rangoon, Vietnam, Japan. And home on the Trans-Siberian.”

I should not have told him this. He exploded with laughter, gagging and choking, smoke shooting out of his nostrils, his big face going red.

“I think I’ll be home by Christmas.”

He said, “I’ll be home on Wednesday.”

Today was Monday. I wanted to go home. Feeling demoralized, I went to a hotel and tried to call my wife but got nothing, just the sound of surf and a feeble voice on the line. I was horribly homesick and could not sleep.

Shiva and I met the next day, also by accident. He had one of the good rooms in the guesthouse, and I passed it on my way out. He called to me and ordered coffee. Among the papers on his coffee table was a telegram: CONGRATULATIONS ON THE HAWTHORNDEN. LONGING TO SEE YOU WEDNESDAY. LOVE, JENNY.

He had won a literary prize. He was going home. His wife loved him. This was bliss — beyond bliss.

“What do you think of India?” I asked.

“I don’t think much!” He howled again.

This was how he conversed. Was it aggressive? He made you ask the questions, and he would give an unhelpful answer and then laugh in a mirthless way.

“This is paradise compared to some places I’ve been,” I said. “Iran. Kabul. Peshawar.”

“This is the Turd World!”

And that laugh again, like a form of punctuation, a jeering exclamation mark. I took it to be nervousness, or obstinacy. The young companion of my London Christmas long ago had become a rather prickly man.

He had become very heavy, and in the heat of India his bulk made him slow and clumsy. He looked uncomfortable. He chain-smoked. He drank whiskey. Instead of a fat, contented drunkard, I had the impression of a dissatisfied sot, confused, unhappy, and angry. Nothing was angrier than his laughter.

He lived in Vidia’s shadow, as I did, but no shadow is darker than a clever brother’s. Yet he had started his intellectual life idolizing Vidia, who left Trinidad in 1950, when Shiva was five, and who was always absent. Shiva became a devotee, and was so deeply influenced that his writing often looked like a parody of Vidia’s. Attempting subtlety, Shiva ended up sounding pompous and convoluted, though he was seen to be the “warmer” brother, in the shorthand of magazine profilers and portraitists. And there was that act of piety which even Vidia marveled at: the memorizing of The Mystic Masseur. Veneration could go no further than reciting the sacred texts by heart, but it was death for Shiva’s prose style. In spite of his mockery of me, it was impossible for me not to feel a bit sorry for him.

Yet at that moment in India I envied him his swift return to London. I cursed my luck at being on this long trip alone. The phones didn’t work. I got no mail. I was like an old out-of-touch explorer. True, it was the reason I saw so much, and the reason I was changed by the experience. But if someone had said, “Here’s ten thousand dollars, scrap the trip,” I would not have hesitated to join Shiva on the London-bound plane.

There was a young Indian woman who hung around the guesthouse. She stared at me. Why? Indian women never did that. She touched my arm. “Hey, I’ve been to the States.” She took my hand and squeezed it. In Indian terms, this was as if she had said, “Take me, I’m yours.” She looked me straight in the eye.

“I won’t bite you,” she said. Her powdered face and red lips and kohl-darkened eyes gave her a lecherous mask that made me desire her and fear her at the same time.

“You are afraid of me,” she said.

“Right.”

Her red betel-stained teeth were straight out of a “Kali, Goddess of Destruction” picture. She plucked at her sari and laughed again. I was not afraid of making love to her — I sensed she was wild; I was afraid of everything that would come after — indignant relatives with swords and daggers, my goolies in great danger. Everything in India had a price, and pleasure usually had a penalty.

That night, having a farewell drink with Shiva, I saw the Kali woman again in the courtyard.

“See that girl?” Shiva said. “I slept with her this morning.” His laughter was more ambiguous than ever. “She’s crazy. I mean, really crazy.”

In the morning he left for London to collect his literary prize and resume his life — lucky dog. That same day I took a train to Nagpur. I put “the Turd World” into my diary, and the remark found its way into my book, without Shiva’s name attached to it. After Madras in southern India, I went to Sri Lanka and beyond, way beyond: Burma, Vietnam, Japan — onward, going slowly into the unknown.

Christmas came. I was in Siberia, it was winter. I was still on my goddamn trip! I battled on. At last, around the New Year, I returned home. I wrote my book and it was published a year later. I paid my bills.

And I saw Shiva at parties.

“Taking any more trains, Paul? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

Now I was sure it was envy, and I pitied him, and his laughter defied interpretation.

Vidia’s image of himself as a struggler against the odds and of Shiva as an overprotected child of privilege might have been accurate, but it made their relationship touchy. I knew little about their childhoods. It was clear that Shiva had had a smoother ride at Oxford, and when he decided to make a living as a writer, he was welcomed by publishers. His older brother was a writer, so surely he too had to have talent. Shiva hated that sort of reasoning but profited by it nevertheless.

“He’s a complainer, always making excuses. My father was like that,” Vidia said.

The father, Seepersad, was an enigma to me, but the fact that the fictional Mr. Biswas had been modeled on him helped to understand the man. Some of those Biswas traits were recognizable in the Naipaul brothers. Mostly I saw Shiva as a suffering parody of a much younger Vidia — prickly and slow, hating the shadow that had been cast over him by his famous and formidable brother, who could be so bluntly present or silently absent.

Taking Vidia’s cue that writing was an ordeal, each sentence a hideous labor (I always wanted to jeer at them and say, “Isn’t it much worse for men at sea?”), Shiva went Vidia one further and did no writing at all for long periods. He used his inactivity as an example of the uniqueness of his gift, yet the writing he did manage to scratch off, while perhaps the result of extraordinary labor, did not seem so extraordinary in itself. He just talked more about it. Vidia said he was lazy and drank too much. He said Shiva’s fatness was self-indulgence. If I winced at his description, Vidia admitted he was being brutal. Wasn’t it simpler than this, that Shiva found it very hard to write? But who finds it easy?

“In Vidia’s eyes, Shiva couldn’t do anything right,” Vidia’s long-time editor, Diana Athill, said some time later. “He had this picture in his mind that Shiva was going utterly to disgrace himself and the family and that he was going to become a drug addict, was going to be useless. It was intense anxiety. He was cruel to the boy, really cruel, telling him he was a fool whenever he said anything or did anything, really, to a point where Shiva was sitting there not daring to speak, because if he said anything, he was snipped at.”

“He’s not happy,” Vidia said. “And why?”

What kept Vidia most serene was his often stated belief that there is justice in all things — in human effort as in nature and art: nothing arbitrary or random but always an elemental fairness. The good you did was rewarded, and you were improved by your act. Good writing always succeeded, dishonest writing was always found out — though with all writing, time was a factor; it might take a while for the work to rise or fall. If an apparently inferior writer made a hit, there was always a reason. Vidia did not dismiss popular novelists. He said, “Perhaps there’s something there.” He meant an illumination or a truth, however crudely expressed. He felt George Wallace’s remark about “pointy-headed intellectuals” expressed an essential truth about the corruption in academic life, and he took satisfaction in taunting Americans by quoting Wallace with approval. Evelyn Waugh had managed to infuriate many Americans in a similar way by saying, “Erie Stanley Gardner is your finest novelist.”

But Vidia was only half teasing. He believed there were few real accidents in life. What you took to be an accident was undoubtedly well deserved, a kind of karma. Vidia was the first person I had ever heard use that word, as he was the first in my experience to use “vibration” to mean intimation. He also believed that some people’s inner disturbance and confusion made them magnets for ill fortune; others simply begged for it. Things not going well? Vidia was seldom sympathetic to anyone’s moaning. It had to be your own fault. Literary fellowships and free money and patronage did not get books written; writers did, and a good writer was dauntless. It was not an expression of fatalism or pitiless indifference but rather a belief in cosmic harmony on Vidia’s part when he repeated that in life people got pretty much what they deserved.

Shiva did complain, as Vidia said. Vidia didn’t listen. He saw the complaints as unjustified, merely Shiva’s indulging himself. “He is seeking attention. It’s theater. Stop listening and he’ll stop complaining.”

It did not help that Vidia praised me, and did so for the same reason. It was not by luck or accident that I was doing well, he said. It was application, hard work. “And you see, Paul, you have something to say.” I did not usually complain, but really, what had I to complain about? Even before my books sold in any numbers, I had found a way of making a living as a writer: publish a book a year and never say no to a magazine assignment. And, out of a horror of destitution, I lived within my means.

The irony was that I saw Shiva much more often than I saw Vidia. We were nearer in age — he was about four years younger than me — so we had more in common and knew many of the same people — Jonathan Raban, for example, who said he found Shiva Bunterish and nervous and inexplicably giggly. Shiva was not as strong as Vidia, but it was his fate, as the younger brother of a distinguished writer, to have his path to publication smoothed. Understandably, Shiva wanted to be judged separately from his brother, to be seen clearly, without that obscuring fraternal shadow. Yet he seemed self-destructive in his choice of subjects, which served only to make the brothers more intensely like versions of each other, alike in their concerns. Both of them wrote about colonialism as outrageous farce, the futility of African travel, the corruption of power in the Caribbean, the dead end of the Third World, the stagnating complexities of India, and, relentlessly, the question of alienation: where do I belong? And in this they were each deluded in believing that anyone cared.

Some of Shiva’s literary obsessions verged on mimicry. Shiva’s attack on calypso sounded like a parody of Vidia. There was a definite resemblance in their prose styles, even in the adoption by Shiva of some of Vidia’s favorite words—“tainted,” “fantasy,” “distress,” “loss,” “fraudulence”—and even the same fastidiousness, expressed in an almost identical way, calling attention to its similarity by the use of exaggeration.

Here is Shiva Naipaul having lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Sri Lanka, not an unusual event for a traveler anywhere. He is in the seaside town of Galle, a pretty little place. But for Shiva it is a disgusting experience of unimaginable uncleanness:

“I ate sparingly and nervously, avoiding the thumb-printed tumbler of water that had been brought me. Now, walking across the vacated Green, with the taint of sewage rising from the seashore, it was hard not to be apprehensive, not to recall, with rising alarm, the abandon with which carelessly tended hands had soiled my plate, my knife, my fork.”

The inhabited world is fairly dirty. It did not seem to occur to Shiva that his pompous description said nothing about the world and everything about his squeamishness. Vidia’s horror of dirt was a legendary revelation of his anal compulsiveness, but when he wrote about it he sometimes made a larger point, about caste or culture. Shiva merely revealed himself as a timid fusspot.

Vidia, the true colonial, made a convincing case for his sense of alienation, although any reader could reply, “So what? We all have problems.” After all, he wasn’t writing about the human condition so much as the privileged life of a prosperous middle-aged and middle-class shuttler between Wiltshire and Kensington — himself and no one else. Shiva, the postcolonial sixties rebel and seventies conservative, was unconvincing in depicting himself as an exile and a wanderer. Anyway, what wanderer? He frankly hated travel. His idea of the Worst Journey in the World was a junket to a Chinese restaurant. His trips were very short. He had married into a family of distinguished journalists and lived well in London, where he was known as a partygoer.

He went to parties alone and usually got tipsy, if not drunk, in a sad, giggly way. At his drunkest he indulged in weird confrontations with women in which he would compliment their beauty in a babu accent (“Goodness gracious, you are wery beautifool”), and with such insistence the women did not know whether they were being wooed or insulted.

Whatever Shiva happened to be writing was never going well. He paraphrased Vidia’s complaint about the difficulty of writing and made it into a form of boasting. “I haven’t written a word. It’s such a struggle.” What was the problem? He had wide recognition for his first book, a generous publisher, and hospitality in all the London papers.

I tried not to argue, for fear it would have seemed that I was minimizing his pain.

“A book is like an illness with me,” he said.

“Of course.”

“But you just churn them out, Paul.”

“You think so?”

That belittling word “churn” brought to mind a stick and a keg.

“What are you churning out now?”

That laugh of his, barking and too loud, was pure misery and perhaps was meant as another interruption, which kept me from replying.

“Writing’s easy for you,” he said.

This sort of insult I had begun to hear more and more in London — though not in the States — for envy gave the English a reckless confidence in giving offense. It had started with Shiva, probably as the result of his resentment of Vidia’s avuncular attention and pointed praise. My not complaining about the difficulty of writing was a sure sign I was second-rate; Shiva’s struggle was clear evidence of his genius.

“He drinks too much,” Vidia said. “The body is going. He is fat. Notice how puffy his face is? He gets no exercise. It is a lazy, selfish body.”

That was another aspect of Vidia’s sense of justice: you got the body you deserved. And in Vidia’s judgment people’s bodies told everything about them, even to the extent of bad skin making you a villain and obesity being like a moral fault. The fat characters in Vidia’s books were nearly always unreliable, if not outright crooks.

“I am very proud of having a beautiful physique,” Vidia had told an interviewer. “The body is the one thing we can control. It’s a kind of envelope that contains the soul.” In spite of this, several people had mentioned to me how Vidia, because of his small size and his asthma, had a deep sense of physical inferiority.

Anyone could see that Shiva was unhappy. I did not know why, but there had to be a connection with Vidia. I still felt that knowing Shiva better was a way of knowing Vidia, because — though Vidia might deny it — one brother was often the key to understanding the other. The paradox was that, more and more, Shiva and I were fraternal, in the feuding, wrong-footing mode, and our relationship was undermined by the nearest thing to sibling rivalry.

“Come to tea on Sunday,” Shiva said at a party one night. “Bring the family.”

That sounded all right. This was early on. Our wives and children had not met. Shiva was living in a house in Essex. On a map it seemed a straightforward drive, but on the day it was a three-hour slog in my small car because of rain and bad roads and the quaint and maddening bottlenecks of English villages (“This must be Gosfield”). All the way I had promised my little family that this visit would be worth it. We met Shiva’s father-in-law, a noted broadcaster. The house was crowded with people — Shiva was well connected. But he was on the telephone when we arrived, and when I managed to say hello, he smiled in exasperation.

“Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full?”

And then that gloomy laugh.

We had our tea and left after an hour, because it was such a long way back to south London. He had hardly spoken to me.

“Which one was Shiva?” my wife said.

I mentioned this to Vidia, that we had gone all that way for tea but had felt unwelcome.

Vidia said, “He told me he gets depressed when he sees you.”

“I can’t imagine why. I never talk about my work. I just listen to him.”

“Perhaps that’s the reason.”

“That I listen?”

“That he hates himself.”

At another period, Shiva had a large apartment in Earls Court, over a bookstore. It seemed very stylish, his living in the middle of things, especially the raffish multiculturalism of Earls Court. We lived narrowly in distant, lifeless Catford, an hour across London. By now we were unwilling regulars at each other’s dinner parties.

The first time at dinner in his Earls Court flat, I noticed that Shiva was served a special meal: bigger, different, tastier-looking.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Shiva’s a vegetarian,” his wife explained, as Shiva protected his full plate with his forearms.

“It looks like chicken to me,” someone said.

“It is chicken,” Shiva said. “It’s not as bad as beef.”

There was beef in our moussaka, and I felt at that moment all of us coveted Shiva’s special meal. Shiva explained that he had been raised eating certain foods. I gathered that chicken was regarded as a vegetable in the Naipaul household, and I was able to understand a bit better Vidia’s contradictory crankishness when it came to diet.

On another visit to Shiva’s, helping to clear up after the meal, I put some leftovers into the refrigerator and saw many stacked containers, all precisely labeled: Lunch Wednesday, Dinner Wednesday, Lunch Thursday, and so forth.

“You’re well organized,” I said to his wife, who was at the sink.

“Oh, that. I’m going away Tuesday.”

She explained that whenever she went away, she left meals for Shiva, all the meals he would need for the duration of her absence. They were all different, precooked, needing only to be heated up. Shiva was unable or unwilling to make a meal for himself, so this nannying — or mothering — was the elaborate answer.

Seeing me smile, his wife reacted defensively and said, “Vidia doesn’t cook either. He is waited on hand and foot by Pat.”

That was true, and it was a world away from my life and the lives of most of the people I knew. Was it that the Naipaul brothers’ lives were well organized or that they had submissive wives? It spoke volumes about the family home in Trinidad. Surely they had been indulged, and all that had done was to make them seem helpless, if not infantile.

Even if someone had offered me meals and nannying, I would have refused. In the balancing act of working on The Mosquito Coast, I was progressing with such steadiness that I became superstitious: I wanted nothing in my life to change. I stayed in London. I ate the same lunch every day, fish fingers. I meditated intensely on the implications of my story and on the characters. I felt that any change in my circumstances would upset my narrative.

The month I finished my novel, April of 1981, I wrote to Vidia, who immediately and enthusiastically replied, “That novel sounds terrific — just the kind of thing you would do very well. The idea is at once simple and appetizing: the way good ideas should be.”

It was what I wanted to hear after almost two years of working on the book. Vidia had never been more generous.

“Your energy is amazing; you seem vitalized by all your many successes. I run across your name and your books everywhere and I always feel slightly proprietorial.”

After all these years he was still my friend and my booster. I rejoiced in pleasing him. He read the new novel.

He said, “This is a big book.”

Both Shiva and I had been shaken by the 1978 mass suicide, in Jonestown, Guyana, of members of the People’s Temple commune. To me it was one of the ghastliest events that had occurred in my lifetime. Paranoia could not take a more violent or nightmarish form. The transplanted messiah, Jim Jones, creating madness among his followers, was someone who had triggered my thinking about The Mosquito Coast, though my book was very different. Shiva wrote a book about Jonestown, Journey to Nowhere. He often alluded to the grisly nature of his experience, for he had arrived in Jonestown before all the more than nine hundred bodies had been bagged and taken away. He said that he had never seen anything worse. He was dispirited by the experience, and for a while it rendered him mute. He suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown during the writing of the book. I understood then that it was not conceit or vanity or childishness that kept him so insecure, but something fundamental: he had emptied the goblet and in tipping it up had seen fear lurking on the bottom, as in the horrific line from the play I used to teach: “I have drunk and seen the spider.”

In his depression Shiva’s writing became turgid and verbose. Parties were “revelries,” speeches were “orations.” He would write, “Machines had subverted the bondage of mass muscular exertion,” when he could have written, “Machines had taken the place of workers.”

Speaking of Trinidadians, he wrote, “We acknowledged, with unspoken candor, our humble status in the imperial dispensation,” a pretentious way of saying, “We felt we didn’t matter much in the British empire.”

When truth broke through pastiche the effect was vulgar, and what he attempted as style was forced and unrewarding. He admitted as much. He said he was frustrated. Now nearly everything he wrote was a form of fault-finding.

“I sit at my desk all day,” he told me. “I do nothing. I try to write. It won’t come.”

This was not the lazy artistic boast of ten years before, but a more imploring anguish. It was also fear.

“Sometimes I can’t do anything until five o’clock. Sometimes there’s nothing.”

With no one else listening, he didn’t mock me, didn’t giggle; he was solemn, and he looked terrible: pasty, swollen, almost deranged, holding a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

“My brother thinks I’m lazy.”

Weariness was in his voice. He was a man burdened, and now I knew it was not an act. He seemed on the point of resignation. When Indira Gandhi was killed, in 1984, he flew to India and wrote an angry, grieving piece. As though evading the serious commitment of the book he had started, he wrote more articles: about the Third World — denying that such a place existed; about Australia — hating the whole country; about himself and his brother — wishing for his confusion to be understood and admitting that perhaps Vidia was the only person on earth who understood him.

After the least exertion, he became short of breath. He said, “I get so tired,” and the way he said it convinced me something was truly wrong. I asked Vidia whether there was anything we might do to help. But he only repeated that Shiva had brought this misery on himself. He said it with sympathy, helplessly, not knowing what the remedy was.

And really, a man of thirty-nine or forty, when he speaks of fatigue you don’t think that he is ill so much as overworked or even exaggerating — too many late nights, he must be neglecting himself. You never imagine that such a person is deathly ill. Yet Shiva was.

He was working on a section of his Australia book, writing about a comical Sinhalese named Tissa, who spoke to him about the futility of male ambition in Sri Lanka. Shiva wrote Tissa’s question, “Is it like that on your island as well?” and then he died.

His heart had been weak. It explained everything he said and did, everything he felt. It had taken away his strength; it had made him tired. It was why he panted and perspired, why he was often winded, why everything was so hard for him.

He was found slumped at his desk by his son, just as thirty-three years before, Shiva had found his own father dead.

I wrote to Vidia as tenderly as I could. He wrote back, saying, “I am melancholy in a clinical, helpless kind of way. I get, or am attacked by, these bad dreams just before waking up. In fact they wake me up.”

And he ended the letter, “How nice, in the middle of this, to get your hand of friendship.”

It was as though I were the brother who had survived. But Vidia went on mourning, and when he wrote The Enigma of Arrival and dedicated it to Shiva, he said of the book, “Death is the motif.”

14. Tainted Vegetables

“AT OXFORD CIRCUS, walk north until you come to the church with a spire like a sharpened pencil,” Vidia said, directing me in his precise way to the Indian restaurant where we were to have lunch. But I knew the church.

I was, as always, eager to see him. I needed to know what was on his mind, because he questioned everything, took nothing on faith, saw things differently from anyone else. His talk was unexpected and original. He was contrary and he was often right.

Long before, I had been with him while he listened to Indians in Uganda boasting of their wealth and security. “They are dead men” was Vidia’s verdict. Now most of London’s newsagents and sub-post offices were run by those same Indians, refugees from Uganda. They comprised almost a whole shopkeeping class in the south of England.

Three years before Shiva died, in 1985, Vidia had been upbeat and funny. “Intellectual pressure” was making his hair fall out, he said. But he was busy and happy. “One seems to be extraordinarily full of affairs.” He was only fifty. He accurately predicted the outcome of the Falklands war, in a characteristic paradox. The Argentines had sworn they would fight to the end.

“When the Argentines say they will fight to the last drop of blood,” he said, “it means they are on the point of surrender.”

And that happened, too. But with Shiva’s death he grew sad. He sorrowed quietly; his grieving showed in his writing, in his choice of subject. He wrote of death and dying — his sister had also recently died; intimations of mortality and a sadness crept into his prose, the tones of deeper isolation, because there is a note of loneliness in all elegies — beyond the death, something of departure, a sense that he was being left behind.

It made us firmer friends. Now, after almost twenty years, we depended on one another — each of us could count on the other to listen and be sympathetic. We were chastened by Shiva’s death. I realized how precious life was, how brief, how each day mattered.

If we were saddened, we were also vitalized, seeing what a waste it was not to live all we could. Vidia traveled more, but we were able to pick up the thread of friendship after weeks or even months of silence.

That was how I came to be rising from the Oxford Circus tube station to walk north on Upper Regent Street, towards the church with the pencil-like spire that I knew to be All Souls. We met on the sidewalk.

“Yes, yes, yes, Paul.”

Vidia placed a high value on physical characteristics, and especially on radical change. If someone had gotten very fat, or very thin, or pale or pimply, or had begun sporting a silly hat, Vidia took it as a danger sign, a mental lapse, depression, folly, vanity, something deeply wrong.

Watching him size me up swiftly, I could see that he was pleased I had not changed. Nor had he, I told him.

“I’m still doing my exercises every night,” he said.

In the Indian restaurant, the Gaylord, on Mortimer Street, Vidia began staring at the Indian waiter, a bespectacled young man, following him with his eyes around the room as though he had recognized him and was trying to think of his name. At last Vidia raised his hand and called him over.

“Do you know that you look like me?”

The waiter shook his cheeks and squinted, murmuring the question in disbelief. “I am not knowing, sir.”

In his twenties, with crusted sleepless eyes, dark jowls, thick untidy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a scowling smile, he had that fatigued and impatient look of many Indian waiters in London. The news Vidia gave him seemed to unsettle him. It was clear that no one had ever made such an observation to the waiter before. He glanced at Vidia and appeared to be so disturbed by what he saw that he turned away and laughed in a chattering way, his mouth wide, his eyes dead.

“Yes, I look like you,” Vidia said.

He studied the young man’s face closely and with such intensity the waiter backed away, giggling in anguish.

“Maybe, sir.”

“But you don’t really think so.”

“No, sir.”

“And yet it’s true. You look like me.”

This peculiar conversation bothered the waiter but was highly illuminating to Vidia, who seemed to see his younger self before him. The waiter was nervous, contemplating his face as represented by this fiftyish man grinning in satisfaction at him.

“Look in the mirror,” Vidia said. “Go on, you’ll see.”

The waiter, who could never have taken much pleasure in staring at his own reflection, waggled his head, Indian fashion, to mean yes he would. But I could tell that any resemblance was the last thing on which he wanted positive confirmation.

And it was all in Vidia’s mind. I didn’t see much of a likeness.

“All right,” Vidia said. “We’ll order, then.”

Over lunch Vidia told me that he had received his first Public Lending Right check, about £1,500. Mine was about the same, and the more popular authors got quite a bit more. This great scheme for compensating authors on the basis of library loans had finally been introduced in Britain. I had asked Vidia to sign a petition to support the PLR bill some years before. He had refused. I sign nothing. Now he was crowing over his check.

“Publishers want to cash in,” he said. “But why should they? We’re the ones who do the work.”

I said, “That campaign for PLR was quite a struggle. Nothing like it exists in the States. For a long time, no one paid any attention.”

“Really.” He raised himself up slightly from his chair and looked around. “I don’t see anyone I know here.”

“Who are you thinking of, Vidia?”

“No one in particular. But it’s nice when one sees someone one knows in a restaurant in London.”

“I saw Bruce Chatwin the other day in L’Escargot.”

“Who’s Bruce Chatwin?”

It was how Vidia belittled anyone.

“The way he talks,” Vidia said. “All those airs. That name-dropping. He is trying to live down the shame of being the son of a Birmingham solicitor.”

“I don’t think he cares about that,” I said. Bruce was a friend of mine, and I suspected this to be the reason for Vidia’s dismissing him.

“No. You’re wrong. Look at Noel Coward. His mother kept a lodging house. And he pretended to be so grand — that theatrical English accent. All that posturing. He knew he was common. It was all a pretense. And think of his pain.”

He was still scanning the restaurant for a familiar face. Seeing none, he settled into his prawn curry, seeming disappointed, as if he had shown up but no one else had.

“How’s your food?”

“It’s all right, but lunch — lunch is such an intrusion. It fractures one’s day. It takes over, makes the morning hectic, destroys the afternoon, and leaves one no appetite in the evening.”

“What’s the answer?”

“One prefers to break the day into three distinct parts. Work in the morning. Light lunch. Something in the afternoon. Exercise. Prepare for the evening — the dinner. Dinner is grander.”

“Grand” was one of those words that Vidia could use in an almost satirical way. But if you smiled he might react, and then you knew he really meant it. “Very grand” sometimes meant pompous and hollow, or it might mean important or powerful.

“Do you know Bibendum?” he asked.

It was a new restaurant in South Kensington, housed in a well-known Art Deco landmark usually referred to as the Michelin building. Bibendum had been started by the entrepreneur Sir Terence Conran, who insisted that people use his tide. Vidia had met him once, and he hated Conran for his brashness and his flaunted knighthood.

“Do try to get a table there next time, Paul, won’t you? One would be happier there.”

I said I would. What prevented me was the expense. It was a five-star restaurant. No matter where we went I ended up paying, and so I stayed away from the most expensive places, like Claridges, the Ritz, or the Connaught. I preferred the peacefulness of eating in relatively empty restaurants, which were always the less stylish ones.

Knowing of his interest in graphology, I showed him a page from a letter I had received that week. It was handwritten with black ballpoint on a yellow legal-sized sheet. There was no salutation, no signature, just a page of writing. I said, “So what do you think?”

“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Vidia’s face became a mask representing suffering and torment. He made passes with his fingers over the page. “This man is in trouble.”

“It’s from John Ehrlichman, the Watergate man. He sent me this from prison. He’s writing a book.”

We finished lunch. I paid. Leaving the Gaylord, we walked towards All Souls Church, in Langham Place, near Broadcasting House. Vidia pointed out the Langham, once a hotel, then a BBC building, where parts of the Overseas Service had had offices.

“I had an office there,” Vidia said. “I started writing there, in the Freelance Room. God!”

“What were you doing?”

“Caribbean Service. I did programs. One called Caribbean Voices. Went mad wondering whether I could write a book. I began writing Miguel Street there.”

Though I knew he had worked there, it was surprising to hear him mention it. He disapproved of a writer’s working a regular job and was proud of the fact that he had worked only ten weeks on salary, as a copywriter for a company that sold cement. That, as his whole salaried career, was bound to have distorted his view of the working world.

“Such a lovely church,” he said as we entered Langham Place.

“All Souls,” I said. “Thomas Nash.”

“It is Nash’s only church,” Vidia said. “So strong. Look what he does with the simplest lines. They ridiculed it when it was built in the 1820s. No one approved.”

“Kipling got married here,” I said.

Vidia smiled. He loved sparring.

“That was just before he went to America,” he said. “Of course, his wife was American.”

“Henry James was his best man,” I said.

“And then Kipling came back to England, moved into a grand house, and wrote nothing,” Vidia said.

“He wrote some great short stories.”

“Nothing as great as Plain Tales from the Hills.”

“The late stories are much subtler,” I said.

“Everyone tells me that,” Vidia said. He shook his head. “I have been seriously wondering about fiction. What is it now? What can it be?”

“What it has always been,” I said. “A version of the truth. And I think that’s what nonfiction is, too.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said. He thought that was apt. “But I am still wondering. I think the novel as we know it is dated.”

And so we walked along, up to Regents Park and along the footpaths by the flower beds, until it was time for his dental appointment in Harley Street, where we parted.

It seemed cruelly ironic that Vidia’s developing interest in stylish restaurants coincided with serious dental problems — gum disease, a gingivectomy, and painful extractions. I sometimes met him at his dentist’s office. He was one of the few people in England I knew who had a private dentist; most people made do with the impatient National Health Service dentists, who gave them fifteen minutes of attention every four months and, in their incompetent haste, were lax in detecting the sort of gum disease that was afflicting Vidia.

At another lunch, Vidia wincing with each bite from his sore teeth, we talked about money. We usually talked about money, as writers do — the futility of making it, the punishing British tax system, the way people presumed on writers by trying to underpay them, the fatuity of wealth, and could we have some more money, please?

“I know the solution — my solution,” Vidia said.

“Please tell me.”

“I want a million pounds in the bank,” he said. “Not the equivalent of a million in real estate. Not valuables. Not stocks. I want a million in my account.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” I said, so as not to discourage him. In fact, I had no idea how one would accumulate that amount.

“But you have a million, Paul.”

“You’re joking.”

“You got a million for the Mosquito Coast film, surely.”

“Nowhere near it. Maybe a fifth of that.”

“Really.” He was surprised, even shocked.

“And I bought a house with it, so now it’s gone.”

“Actors get paid in the millions, surely.”

“Yes,” I said. “But not writers.”

“I will get my million,” he said, as I paid the bill for lunch.

After yet another lunch, we walked to the offices of his publisher so he could sign three hundred copies of A House for Mr. Biswas, one of the titles in a series of signed books that were part of a book-club offer. I stood by him, opening them to the half-title page, and he wrote his signature. As always, he used a fountain pen and black ink.

“When I wrote this book I wore out a pen. The nib was worn down to the gold. It was a little stump. Imagine the labor.”

He signed, I stacked.

“What is the good of signing books? It simply inflates their value in a bogus way. I will never see the profits. Someone else will get it. All these people who call themselves publishers — they are no better than people who sell books off a barrow.”

I pushed the books at him. He signed quickly, making his initials and his surname into a single calligraphic flourish.

“These will go for big money,” he said. “They will be resold. Why am I doing this?”

And he stopped signing. He put the cap on his pen and stood up. He was done.

“There’s more,” I said.

“That’s enough,” he said, having convinced himself that signing the books was a mistake.

Later that day, we went to my house for tea. My two boys were upstairs in their rooms, doing homework. I called them down so they could say hello. I was proud of them; I wanted Vidia to see them. Now they were the right age. Vidia could not deal with young children — he rather disliked children — but he took to my boys as he had taken to me, long before.

“And what homework are you doing, Marcel?”

“English prep. And a Russian essay.” He swallowed and went on. “On Ivan the Terrible.”

“Tell me about Ivan the Terrible.”

Marcel said, “I’m reading a book about him by Henri Troyat.”

“I know Troyat’s Tolstoy. You say this book is about Ivan the Terrible?”

“It’s his new one. It hasn’t come out here yet.”

“You have the American edition?”

“No. The French one.”

“But this is your Russian essay?”

“My essay’s in Russian. The book’s in French.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said, liking the answer. “And what about you, Louis?”

“English essay. My Phillimore.”

“What is a Phillimore?”

“It’s the big essay of the year. It’s supposed to be pretty long and serious.”

“Is yours long and serious?”

“It’s not done yet. It’s about the attraction of evil.”

“Yes,” Vidia said, concentrating hard and murmuring, “the attraction of evil.”

“Ahab,” Louis said. “Richard the Third.”

“You should read Old Goriot.”

Louis nodded, not sure whether a book or an author was being recommended.

After the boys had gone upstairs Vidia said, “You are so lucky to have your sons. They’re intelligent. They’re polite. They are nice boys.”

Agreeing with him, I deliberately positioned myself near the shelf in the bookcase where all of Vidia’s books were lined up, from the ones I had bought with Yomo, in Kampala, to the latest ones.

I said, “Vidia, would you mind signing these books?”

“Not now. Some other time,” he said.

He had convinced himself in the course of signing all those copies of Biswas that book signing was a cheat. Other people made money from signed books, not the author, who was invariably swindled. He consoled me with a joke about the writer who had signed so many books that the rarest books of all, and the most valuable, were the ones without his signature.

Every October, around the time the Nobel Prize was announced, Vidia was named in confidently speculative articles as the likely recipient. He never mentioned the prize, nor commented on the speculation. On the contrary, he seemed to make a point of ignoring it. It was I who brought up the subject. In 1973, when Patrick White had won, I told Vidia how pleased I was — I liked Patrick White’s fiction, his humorous and sometimes hallucinatory prose style. Besides, he conveyed very specific and vivid images of Australia.

Vidia said, “I’ve read him. I don’t think there’s much there.”

Three years later, Saul Bellow won. Vidia claimed he had never read him. And he laughed when William Golding won in 1983.

“Tell me, what did Golding do to win it?”

The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986.

“What do you think, Vidia?”

“Did he write anything?”

Vidia did not wait for my reply. We happened to be walking down Cromwell Road towards the V and A, and from the way he stiffened his legs in a marching manner and planted his feet more firmly I gathered that he had something on his mind. Perhaps it had unsettled him to think of Wole Soyinka, wearing a crown of laurel leaves, with $190,000 in his pocket. In any case, Vidia became agitated or sad when he thought about Africa.

“The Nobel committee are doing it again,” he said, striding down the sidewalk.

“Doing what?”

“Pissing on literature, as they do every year.”

I started to laugh.

“Pissing from a great height,” he said. “On books.”

In time, we changed from lunch to dinner. “Dinner is grander.” Also, it did not break up the day, as lunch did. Yet our dinners were no more frequent than our lunches had been. One or two, then nothing for a year. He was away — on the long journey for his Islam book, or in India, or, quite often, in Buenos Aires.

I was traveling too, in China and Africa, in the United States, and on book tours. Almost everywhere I went I was asked about Vidia: What influence did V.S. Naipaul have on your writing? or How did Naipaul help you as a writer? There was no simple answer, at least none shorter than would fill a five-hundred-page book. It was understood that we were friends, that we had had a teacher-student relationship when I had started writing. Because Vidia usually avoided book tours (“The book will find its own way”), people wondered what he was like. I told them truthfully that I had never met anyone like him.

“Writers are crankish,” Vidia said. “You get crankish from being alone.”

Often, I heard stories about him — people sought me out to tell me the stories, believing that I had to know everything about my friend.

When something disgraceful was rumored of Vidia, there were often several versions of the story. Vidia’s hasty exit from Amsterdam is a good example of the mutation of a simple tale. In the first version I heard, a Dutchman in Amsterdam told me of Vidia’s disastrous visit of a year before. Vidia had arrived from London to see his Dutch publisher and had agreed to a week of publicity. About an hour after his arrival, a press conference was arranged: Naipaul on a stage, the Dutch audience waiting to ask him questions; cameras, tape recorders, journalists.

The first question, phrased as antagonism, was from a woman who asked him to explain his offensive attitude towards Africans.

Vidia said, “I have no comment on this.”

The woman demanded an answer.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Vidia said.

With that, he walked off the stage. Cameras and lights followed his progress out of the hall. He went back to his taxi, which still held his bag, and back to the airport. He returned that same day to London, without ever having unpacked or seen his hotel, his whole visit torpedoed by a single question that he had found impertinent.

The second version of Vidia’s Amsterdam exit was reported in the Dutch paper Het Parool, under the headline “Naipaul Came, Got Angry and Disappeared.”

In this story Vidia was to have spent five days in the Netherlands, but departed “in anger” after two days. For a public discussion at the Amsterdam PEN Center, Vidia asked that questions be submitted in writing, but he ridiculed them when he looked at them. A sample question he hooted at was “How do you see the future of our world in ten or twenty years?” To save the situation, the Dutch host asked a question, about how terms like “fascism” and “communism” describe European ideas that cannot necessarily be transposed onto societies fundamentally different from our own. When Vidia expressed mild agreement, a woman from Amsterdam’s Free University asked, “If terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ are not applicable, then how about using ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ as yardsticks?”

“Why ‘rich’ and ‘poor’?” Vidia said. “Why not ‘lazy’ and ‘ambitious,’ ‘learned’ and ‘illiterate,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad’? It’s about time we started looking at other aspects of people.”

Hearing this blunt reply, a Dutch author, Margaretha Ferguson, began (so the paper said) “an endless story about Naipaul’s negative attitude towards Islam,” and attacked him for saying that Dutch had virtually disappeared from the Indonesian language.

“Why do you ask me such things?” Vidia said (“irritatedly”). “To show that you know better? Of course you know better!”

“But if you are talking about intellectual clarity—” Miss Ferguson replied (“sputtered”).

“I don’t think you know what intellectual clarity is.”

Vidia rose from his chair, muttered something about the gathering’s being “senseless,” and decided to leave for the airport, where he handed back his fee for the afternoon (750 guilders) and flew home.

Which version was true?

“Does it matter when one is dealing with nonsense?” Vidia told me.

“What went wrong?”

I had had enjoyable experiences in Holland, where most people speak fluent English and are intellectually curious and widely traveled. They had not mythologized their colonial history, as the British and French sometimes had, making wog-bashing into a glorious mission to civilize. In the most provincial Dutch towns hundreds of people turned out to hear visiting novelists lecturing in English. But Vidia disagreed.

“The Dutch,” he said. “Potato eaters.”

The famous image in the Van Gogh painting said everything about the culture, he believed: ugly, moronic, famished peasants in a greasy kitchen, crouched over a basin of spuds and cramming them into their mouths.

I heard other stories that I did not bother to verify, because they had the ring of truth. There were many complaints about his behavior and even his writing. Vidia was used to complaints. He said, “I think unless one hears a little squeal of pain after one’s done some writing, one has not really done much.” Any story related to fastidiousness, and especially food, was unquestionably true.

He was at a dinner party in New York City. He sipped his wine. It was satisfactory — he had insisted on choosing the wine. The dishes were passed by the waiter, people helping themselves. The main course was meat, but because Vidia was a guest, extra dishes of vegetables were also served. Vidia waved them away. He spent the entire meal sipping wine and nibbling a piece of bread.

“You haven’t eaten anything, Mr. Naipaul,” the woman next to him said. She was Dame Drue Heinz, patroness of the arts and part of the Heinz food fortune.

“Yes, I’m a vegetarian,” Vidia said.

“There are vegetables in that bowl,” she indicated.

Vidia explained that he had watched all the vegetables being served and had seen someone — he did not say whom — using a serving implement that had come into contact with the meat dish.

“Those vegetables are tainted.”

At another dinner party, in London, something similar happened. The dishes were passed, Vidia took nothing for himself. He sipped wine, he nibbled bread. The hostess was surprised by Vidia’s indifference, for knowing that he was a vegetarian she had made an effort to provide extra vegetables. She watched Vidia waving the steaming dishes aside.

The host, tipped off by his wife, approached Vidia quietly after the meal.

“Was there anything wrong with the food?”

Vidia said, “I didn’t see anything for me.”

“There were vegetables,” the host said.

“Those were not my vegetables,” Vidia said. “Those were everyone’s vegetables.”

Only a non-Hindu would find this behavior strange. One day in India I was approached by a beggar. I was seated under a peepul tree, eating a coconut that had just been cracked open for me by a street vendor. The beggar asked me for some rupees. He was starving, he said, and he looked it: ragged dhoti, hollow eyes, clawlike hands.

“You are hungry?”

“Yes, sahib.”

“Have the rest of this coconut.”

He refused. He was a high-caste beggar. I was a foreigner, an Untouchable. He could not eat coconut that had been tainted by my fingers. He wanted his own coconut. If he had been dying of thirst, he would not have drunk out of a container that had touched my lips. He was a Brahmin.

Naipaul is a Brahmin. He is also proud of what he has achieved. On another occasion, he was guest of honor at a dinner in London to which a large number of people had been invited. Before the dinner, a woman came up to him and said, “You wrote a dishonest book about London—Mr. Stone. Nothing in that book is true. You totally misrepresented the way we live.”

Vidia did not reply. Instead, he immediately left the party, before all the guests had arrived, before any were seated or the meal was served.

“What about the hostess? Didn’t you say anything to her?” I asked, because Vidia himself had told me this story.

Vidia shook his head. “Let that foolish woman who insulted me explain why I wasn’t there.”

At about the same time, he told an interviewer, “I can’t be interested in people who don’t like what I write, because if you don’t like what I write you’re disliking me.” It was after such an encounter that he said, “England is a country of second-rate people — bum politicians, scruffy writers, and crooked aristocrats.”

To people who found him demanding, insisting on high fees to speak or read, first-class airfares, five-star hotels, chauffeurs, minders, secretaries, and vintage wines, Vidia gave his usual reply: Treat me as you would a world-class brain surgeon or astrophysicist.

His sweeping generalizations and cutting remarks were widely quoted. What about Africa? one interviewer asked him. What was the future for Africa?

“Africa has no future,” he said.

Indians were treated no more gently by him. They did not read, he said. “If they read at all, they read for magic. They read holy books, they read sacred hymns — books of wisdom, books that will do them good.” He told me that it was very bad that Indian women kept their hair so long: “It encourages rape.” He became noted for pointing out that the red-dot caste mark that Indians wear on their forehead means “my head is empty.”

Asked about his book sales on his native island of Trinidad, he said, “My books aren’t read in Trinidad now. Drumbeating is a higher activity, a more satisfying activity.” Once he had written, “I happen to like Spanish dancing,” but later in an interview he said he deplored dancing. “Dance? I’ve never danced. I’d be ashamed of it. It is something out of the jungle. It’s undignified. I dislike all those lower-class cultural manifestations.”

He was invited to San Francisco to read at two performances. He demanded, and received, his astrophysicist’s fee. Both performances were sold out in advance. Vidia read. But the audience was disappointed that he took no questions afterwards. When his host tried to ask him why he would not relent, he pretended he had not heard the question and showed her his tweed jacket, saying, “It’s rather fine, don’t you think? Made in South Africa.”

But he told me the reason. “I was invited to read from my work, not to answer asinine questions.”

He was much more concerned by the movie shown on his incoming flight. He had hated it. He mentioned its name.

“Do you know that film, Paul?”

I said I didn’t.

“The people responsible for making that film should be punished. They should be beaten. Whipped! No one should be allowed to make films like that. It was grotesque. Beat them!”

Another flight, this one to Trinidad, also enraged him. After takeoff, he stood in the aisle to slip off his sweater. A flight attendant hurried towards him.

“Please don’t take your shirt off,” she said.

“You see?” he told me. “Here is this simple West Indian fellow. He is planning to fly to Trinidad with his shirt off — bare-chested — as they do on his island.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m afraid I raised my voice. I screamed at them. I said they were all cunts. Excuse me. I was very angry.”

He screamed in India, too, when he was told to remove his shoes before entering various temples, including the ancient Lord Jagannath Temple in Puri. Vidia pointed out that the temple floor was far dirtier and more disgusting than his shoes and that the idea of defiling such a filthy, unswept place was ridiculous. This story was repeated in The Times of London, which indicated that there had been “an altercation.”

In Portland, Oregon, he was being driven to the airport the day after a reading, which had been arranged by his American publisher. His driver, a local woman, making small talk on the long drive, asked him his feelings about Portland, and, as he had just visited Seattle, she chitchatted about their differences.

“Seattle is an ocean city,” she said. “Portland is definitely an inland place.”

“How would you characterize Portland?” Vidia asked.

“This is a small town,” she said.

Vidia suddenly became furious and turned on the woman, shouting, “I don’t go to small towns! I never go to small towns!”

He raged on as the nervous woman drove. It was as though he had been tricked into visiting Portland, conned into believing it was a real city — which of course it is, substantial and prosperous and book-loving, Seattle’s younger sister.

Seeing that her driving had been seriously impaired by Vidia’s outburst, the woman gripped the wheel and wondered what to say.

“Thank you for doing this, then,” she said at last. “I really didn’t expect you to come here. I don’t expect you’ll be doing it again.”

“By thanking me, you show me how stupid you are,” Vidia said.

I must not cry, the woman thought, negotiating the rush-hour freeway traffic and feeling that tears were filling her eyes. She had risen early, given her husband breakfast, seen her children off to school, and hurried in the darkness to meet Vidia at his hotel, pay his hotel bill, and give him his fee and his lift to the airport. Now, so as not to rile Vidia further, she politely denied that she was stupid, and she kept driving.

Vidia said, “You are stupid, because if you knew anything about me, you would not have invited me to your small town.”

“But you were sent here,” the woman said. “You have to understand that it was your publicist who arranged this. She indicated that you wanted to come.”

“They don’t know me!” Vidia howled. “They don’t know me!”

He was still ranting as the woman drove up the ramp to the airport terminal.

“They are stupid too. How dare they send me here!”

“That’s their job, to put you in front of audiences,” the woman said, and brought her car to the curb. She was dazed. She told me later, “It felt like being hit by a two-by-four.” She got out, took Vidia’s bag from the back seat, and placed it on the sidewalk.

Vidia said, “Please bring my bag in,” and turned away sharply.

Inside the terminal, the woman set the bag down on the scale at the check-in counter.

Just as Vidia was about to speak, the woman winced. She thought he was going to scream again. But he said, “You have lovely fingers. So thin.”

Without a word, the woman left him. She went to her car and found a parking ticket on her windshield for $72. She drove home sobbing.

The woman was my friend. In telling me the story, she was also saying, Why did your friend Naipaul do this to me? I winced at these stories. I had no answer.

Such stories that people volunteered, saying “You must hear this,” Vidia always said were true. It was sometimes hard for me to imagine his fury or his cold cruelty, because we had never quarreled, nor had I ever witnessed a scene as awful as those I heard described.

There was a story I never asked Vidia to verify — didn’t dare ask, because I wanted it to be true. If it was not true, it ought to have been.

Ved Mehta is a distinguished Indian writer. Vidia knew of him. Speaking of The New Yorker once, how under the editorship of William Shawn he could not interest the magazine in his writing, Vidia said, “Of course, they already have a tame Indian.”

Ved Mehta is also famously blind. A certain New Yorker doubted his blindness. Seeing Mehta at a New York party, speaking to a group of attentive people, holding court, the man decided to test it. He had always been skeptical that Mehta was totally blind, since in his writing he minutely described people’s faces and wrote about the nuances of color and texture with elaborate subtlety, making precise distinctions.

The man crept over to where Mehta was sitting, and as the writer continued to speak, the doubting man began making faces at him. He leaned over and waved his hands at Ved Mehta’s eyes. He thumbed his nose at Ved Mehta. He wagged his fingers in Ved Mehta’s face.

Still, Mehta went on speaking, calmly and in perfectly enunciated sentences, never faltering in his expansive monologue.

The man made a last attempt: he put his own face a foot away and stuck his tongue out. But Mehta spoke without pause, as if the man did not exist.

Realizing how wrong he had been, the man felt uncomfortable and wanted to go home. Leaving the party, he said to the hostess, “I had always thought Ved Mehta was faking his blindness, or at least exaggerating. I am now convinced that Ved Mehta is blind.”

“That’s not Ved Mehta,” the hostess said. “It’s V.S. Naipaul.”

15. “It’s Major”

AT SOME POINT in these late middle years, when Vidia was working on a book, hiding and making himself ill from hunching over it as his handwriting grew tinier with concentration and anxiety, he would interrupt himself in describing what he was writing and say, “It’s Major.” His pompous certainty gave the word a capital letter.

In the past he had said, “It’s Important,” or “It’s a Big Book,” and raised his eyes and seemed to see it hovering in the air, like the prophet Joseph Smith contemplating the gold plates of Mormonism glittering in the hands of the angel Moroni. Several times, Vidia had applied this praise to me. The Mosquito Coast was a Big Book. My Africa books were Big Books. They might even have been Important Books. But they weren’t Major. A Bend in the River was Major. Being Vidia, he repeated it: “It’s Major. It’s Major.”

Was he satirizing himself? Not so far as I knew. He never spoke about his work except in tones of the utmost solemnity. No one I had ever met was so devoted to the act of writing. That was his lesson. His dedication and belief had attracted and inspired me, so I had followed him, uttering my own humble equivalent of “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?” Vidia was almost mystical in his belief in writing, for literary creation was a form of prayer, a disturbing prayer. He was not the writer as equal, the reader’s buddy, but rather the writer as priestly figure. Nor did he deviate from his vows: if he said something was Major, he meant it.

Much of Vidia’s writing is like a literary shadowgraph, full of the starkly textured silhouettes of keenly observed shadows, as though the penumbra for Vidia has more meaning than the person or thing that shapes it. Miguel Street, the first book he wrote (though not the first published), ends with a dramatic departure, as the narrator says, “I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, only looking at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.”

There is also adumbration in the last sentence of In a Free State: “Seventeen months later these men, or men like them, were to know total defeat in the desert; and news photographs taken from helicopters flying down low were to show them lost, trying to walk back home, casting long shadows on the sand.”

Perhaps because of its shadowy tide, there are many shadows in An Area of Darkness, but the best image occurs in Amritsar: “Each Sikh was attached to a brisk black shadow.” And in his latest, Beyond Belief, a book that is almost devoid of landscape and weather and color, he writes particularly of shadows, how in Iran “on sunny days light and cloud shadows constantly modeled and remodeled the ridges and the dips of the bare, beige-colored mountains.” In that same book, trees are judged less by their foliage than by their shadows, as with the trees he describes on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan: “a spindly hybrid poplar that cast little shadow.” And the racecourse in Kuala Lumpur, “green and sun-struck, with still, black shadows.” And the wall in Tehran that “cast a broad diagonal of shadow tapering up to the top and there disappearing.” Even people can be shadows, like the servants in Pakistan, “the thin and dingy shadow people of every Pakistani household.”

It is as if, for Vidia, shadows have substance.

He did not, of course, use language casually. He was particular in his choice of words, which made him a demanding listener, too. Any word he used was intended, and considered; he sought simplicity, and one of his gifts was finding ambiguity and subtle meaning using primary colors. It was unusual for him to use a word such as “deliquesce,” though he did once, in An Area of Darkness; “nigrescent” he used only in The Mystic Masseur. He would say “cushion-shaped” rather than “pulvinate,” and “strong as leather” instead of “coriaceous,” and would always choose “delay” over “cunctation.” Anything that smacked of show, or style, or display, or falsity, anything that was used purely for effect, he disdained. Writing must never call attention to itself. “I just wish my prose to be very transparent. I don’t want the reader to stumble over me.” He was such a stickler for the truth, and so determined to root out any pretense in his work, that a style evolved made of favorite words, a way of expressing an idea and the ideas themselves, a tone of voice, recognizable sentence structures. His style came naturally and was the more distinct because it was a rejection of style. No one wrote like him.

The lightness of his early books was gone. Much of the humor was gone. His writing was denser, plainer, devoid of ornamentation. His gift for summing up a landscape was as strong as ever, but even more abbreviated, the effects concentrated in just a few words, a flash of light, an intrusion of weather, the texture of stone or wood or fading light sharply rendered. His writing acquired a wintry stoicism, full of fine shadings of a single color, powerful for its being monochromatic; a lushness was lost, but he had never trusted lushness. And now, in travel, he let people speak for themselves — sometimes for a dozen pages of monologue, in his attempt to devise a new sort of travel book, which was a chorus of people talking about their lives, a chain of voices, with hardly any intervention on his part.

There was always a lesson for me. I was not so sure that native monologues were the best way to write about a distant country. Vidia always said, “Make the reader see.” All that talking, like those ten-page confessional speeches in a Russian novel, blurred my vision. His more recent books were shaped like Studs Terkel’s tape-recorded narratives, but of a heartless and selective sort — tendentious, a word that Vidia hardly ever used.

He did not parody himself, but he had kept to his habit of thinking out loud. Saying “It’s Major” was his way of testing the possibility on me.

I took it that way. He was trying it out, and also, in his heart, he believed it to be true.

Another day he said, “Can you meet me in Kensington?”

I said yes, and met Vidia at the appointed place, a crimson telephone booth on a side street.

“Please make a phone call for me,” he said.

Following his instructions, I dialed the number, made the call, and asked for a certain woman; I had made no comment when Vidia told me the woman’s name was Margaret. She was summoned to the phone by the man who had answered me in a chilly voice, as though he suspected the ruse. I told Margaret that Vidia would call at a particular time.

“It’s much too boring to explain,” Vidia said after I hung up.

He did not have to explain. It was no mystery to me that such a wonderful writer could speak of his present work as Major, and be a guest at Garden Party at Buckingham Palace (The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty to invite…), and the next moment would implore me like a child to dial a telephone number, because — surely? — he feared his own undisguisable voice might provoke an unwelcome reaction. He didn’t want to be told off. He was human.

Now I knew, as only a friend can, that for all his apparent strength, he could also be weak and unsure, and even unfair, with a coldly sarcastic streak. He looked at the populous continent of Africa and said, “Bow-and-arrow men!” or “Cuffy!” He glanced across the English Channel at Holland and said, “Potato eaters!” He frowned at the whole of the Middle East and grunted, “Mr. Woggy.”

But he had also written subtly of Africa, and appreciatively of Europe, and as for the Middle East, he had written an entire book about Islam. So, while I tried to see him clearly, I kept from judging what I did not understand.

At its most profound, friendship is not a hearty, matey celebration of linked arms and vigorous toasts; it is, rather, a solemn understanding that is hardly ever discussed. Friends rarely use the word “friendship” and seldom speak of how they are linked. There is a sort of trust that is offered by very few people; there are favors very few can grant: such instances are the test of friendship. With your ego switched off, you accept this person — his demands, his silences — and it is reciprocal. The relationship does not have the hideous complexity of a family’s sibling rivalry — that struggling like crabs in a basket. Nor does it have the heat of romantic love or the contractual connection of marriage. Yet a sympathy as deep as love springs from the moment you detect any disturbance or intimation of inadequacy in this other person. You take the rest on faith. It is not belief but acceptance, and even a kind of protection.

Friendship arises less from an admiring love of strength than a sense of gentleness, a suspicion of weakness. It is compassionate intimacy, a powerful kindness, and a knowledge of imperfection. Conversely, the attraction of power seems to me purely sexual in origin, something to do with advancing and strengthening the symmetry in the species, and with animals looking for mates. In the natural world the weak or wounded are outrun and eaten by predators. There are plenty of robust courtships among animals, and the strong have flocking instincts and a pack mentality: animal species succeed because they reject the lame and the halt. Geeks and wimps in the animal world are left to die. Friendship is peculiarly human, and all the implications of friendship lead inevitably to the conclusion that friends make bad mates.

Humans like each other for opposite reasons, because although we might be weak and ineffectual, we are still kind. We have that in common, and much else: our intelligence and sympathy and self-respect. Vidia had liked me long ago in Africa. Before I had dared to admit that I wanted to write a book, he had said, “You’re a writer.”

How helpless I must have seemed. But he saw other strengths in me, something in my heart. He saw my soul in my face, my art in the lines of my palm, my ambition and moods in the slope and stroke of my handwriting.

I had thought he was very strong. We became friends. I saw that he had many weaknesses — and he saw mine. It made us better friends. Most writers are cranks, so friendship among them is rare, and they end up loners. I was lucky.

Friendship means favors. Our friendship had started with a favor, Vidia’s saying “Do you have a motorcar?” And soon after, he did me the favor of reading some things I had written. He was under no obligation; he hardly knew me; I was not his student. The favors were reciprocal. Often the same favor helped both of us. I read The Mimic Men in proof form for typos; that was my favor to him. He allowed me the first glimpse of The Mimic Men and I learned a great deal; that was his favor to me.

As the years passed, he would ask me for simple mysterious favors, like dialing the telephone number. Now and then he asked me to read the typescript of a book.

A writer asks a friend to read something in typescript — a smudged provisional form — in order to be encouraged. In this lonely and paranoia-inducing job we need friendly words. And unless a writer already thinks a piece of writing is very good, he does not hand it over for inspection and favorable comment. After that, with publication, there are many judgments, but by then the writer has moved on to something else. So the first look and the first praise is crucial, and often it is all that matters. It is a privileged peep into the heart of a writer at his most vulnerable. No writer would allow it unless praise was expected.

“I would like you to look at my new book,” Vidia said. “It’s Major.”

It was A Bend in the River, a bundle of typed pages. It was set in Africa. Even before I began reading it, I was apprehensive. Vidia was afraid of “bush people,” as he said, of “bow-and-arrow men.” Most of Africa seemed to represent his worst nightmare of brutishness and illiteracy. He was without much hope. “Africa has no future.”

I opened the book. I read, “Nazruddin, who sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I would have it easy when I took over.”

The narrator of this perversely plain opening sentence, Salim, was a Muslim. That was something new. As a Brahmin, a half-believing Hindu, Vidia had never shown much interest in Muslims, and he had often been distinctly unsympathetic, blaming Islamic nationalists for the partition of India and for a repressive Pakistan. In Africa he had gravitated to the Hindu dukawallahs.

Right away I felt something was wrong, not just with that opening sentence but with some details. Salim ate nothing but beans. Surely a Muslim would eat meat and would make sure the animal had been slaughtered in the proper way, so that it was halal, the Islamic equivalent of kosher. Vidia had unconsciously imposed his own bean eating on his narrator. I made a note in the margin: Eats only beans?

The novel showed an intimate knowledge of Kisangani, at a bend in the Zaire River. In an earlier magazine piece about the Congo, “A New King for the Congo,” Vidia had written of how Stanleyville — Stanley Falls Station — had been the actual haunt of Mr. Kurtz, the heart of darkness, and “seventy years later at this bend in the river, something like Conrad’s fantasy came to pass.” He meant the tyrannical reign of Mobutu.

I found myself reading the typescript quickly, finding little to comment upon. It was a good book. It contained the somnolence as well as the random violence of Africa, and Vidia’s nose anatomized the stinks and putrefaction, the atmosphere of imperial failure and ruin. It was also a love story. Salim has an affair with Yvette, the wife of an expatriate. Salim is also a very prickly fellow. One day he feels slighted by Yvette, so he kicks her. She cries. Moments later she gets into bed, inviting him to join her. He realizes that it is the end of their affair. “Her body had a softness, a pliability, and a great warmth.” One expects that he will make love to her. He holds her legs apart. What Salim did next made me swing the typescript away from my face: “I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit.” What? Yvette objects — naturally — and she shouts and struggles. So Salim hits her again. “Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow.”

I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit.

The difficulty I always had with Vidia’s scenes of sex or violence became almost overwhelming. Was it because I did not want to read such scenes for what they disclosed about my friend? A writer is never more unconsciously confessional than when he writes of sex. Vidia’s scenes were aggressive, strange, joyless. Women’s bodies were pathetic and frail; they smelled. He was forever finding women leaky and damp, in sadly wrinkled clothes, creases at the crotch, stains at the armpits. Even when they tried to correct the condition, they could not win. In In a Free State, Bobby finds a sachet in Linda’s room. “It was a vaginal deodorant with an appalling name. The slut, Bobby thought, the slut.”

And in The Mimic Men there had been the whore in Spain whom Ralph Singh brought to his hotel room: “A figure from hell with a smiling child’s face.” She is very fat. The act of love is like a visit from a proctologist. “Nails, tongue, breath and lips were the instruments of this disembodied probing… The probing went lower. I was turned over on my belly. The probing continued with the same instruments.”

Disgust and desire were mingled with a distinct hostility towards women in Guerrillas. The “white liberal” woman, Jane, becomes aroused when she is viciously slapped, “so hard that her jaw jarred… and then she was slapped again.” She discovers “to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.” Odd that Vidia, of all people, found any veracity in the misogynistic cliché of slapping as foreplay and a beating as an aphrodisiac. Later, in a Black Power commune, Jane is raped by Jimmy Ahmed, who is the commune’s leader. Jimmy has a hair-trigger problem: “Just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over.” But forget hanky-panky: Jane is more aroused by being slapped around. And Jimmy is actually homosexual: “He longed for the feel of Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.” Nevertheless, Jane stays in the commune, only to be violently sodomized by Jimmy, who taunts her: “You didn’t bring your Vaseline.” In this act, his ejaculatio praecox is apparently cured: “He drove deeper and deeper until he was almost sitting upright on her.” Very soon after, at Jimmy’s command, Jane is hacked to death with machetes.

In his essay on Evita Peron, Vidia mentions Evita’s full red lips, hinting at “her reputed skill in fellatio.” He describes the machismo of Argentine males and their single-mindedness on the subject of sodomy. “The macho’s conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her… La tuve en el culo, I’ve had her in the arse… a kind of sexual black mass.” Elsewhere in his writing he would describe a man with a complexion “like risen dough” and imply, and sometimes assert, it to be the clear indication that the man was an ardent masturbator, much as Dickens had implied the same nocturnal autoeroticism by giving Uriah Heep circles around his eyes. If it is fair to regard the passions and fantasies of a writer’s characters as those of the writer himself — and why not? — then I found Vidia’s observations unsettling.

“In the old days I would have grown dizzy with excitement here,” Vidia wrote recently in Beyond Belief, describing the crowds of Pakistani whores in the red-light district of Lahore. “Up to my mid-thirties I had been attracted to prostitutes and sought them out.” If that was true, how did it square with his looking me in the eye in Kampala, when he was thirty-four, and saying, “I have given up sex"? It did not square at all, of course, and I now believed the later statement, of his having been a whore-hopper, which was why I was convinced that only with the passage of time did one know the truth.

But I had A Bend in the River in my hand. The spitting scene stayed in my mind, as well as that unpromising first sentence. The rest I liked. We met for tea. I brought the typescript.

“What do you think, Paul?”

“You’re right. It’s Major.”

“No suggestions?”

“The first sentence is wonderful,” I said. “But there is an even better one in the sixth paragraph.”

“Show me.”

It was in the middle of the paragraph. It ran, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

It was certainly a mouthful for a semi-educated Indian shopkeeper in the Congolese bush, yet it seemed to me the most effective way of starting the novel.

Vidia circled it, made a balloon for it, and indicated where it should be inserted, at the top of the first paragraph.

“You’re right, Paul,” he said. “I’m sure that’s better. It will sell more copies this way.”

“One other thing. Salim eats an awful lot of beans. He never eats meat.”

“Patsy said something about that.”

“Give him some meat, I think.”

A Bend in the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. I was one of the Booker judges. I reread the book, one of many submissions for the important prize, and saw that Vidia had transposed the sentence, as I had suggested. He had also made Salim a credible carnivore. But when it came to the decision, I voted against it. Mine was the deciding vote. I preferred Patrick White’s novel, The Twyborn Affair.

“Patrick White? Over my dead body,” one of the panelists said.

Another said to me, “I thought Naipaul was your friend.”

“So what? I didn’t like the spitting. I wasn’t convinced by the ending — all that to-ing and fro-ing, the visit to London.”

In the end, we compromised on Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald, and most people jeered at our choice. They said Naipaul should have won. But Vidia had already won the Booker Prize with In a Free State. It was thought that because I was a judge, Vidia would be a shoo-in. Not at all.

Though Vidia maintained that writing was fair and that books always made their own way, he had been impressed by the effectiveness of Shiva’s agent. I had introduced Shiva to this agent, who was also my agent. Vidia asked for an introduction and very soon afterwards became a client. Vidia’s advances and the terms of his contracts were greatly improved. He might soon have his million.

“I am not happy with my publisher,” Vidia said on another occasion.

I introduced him to my publisher.

“What can I do to tempt him?” my publisher said.

“Give him a million pounds.”

“Out of the question.”

“Then get a table at a fabulous restaurant for dinner. Not lunch. ‘Dinner is grander.’ Then let Vidia order the wine. It’s not a guarantee of success, but at least he won’t get up in the middle and stalk away.”

“Do you think he would have the temerity to do that?”

“It has happened before.”

I was invited to the dinner. My publisher was nervous. Vidia ordered a white Burgundy and a prawn entrée. But the prawns were bad. Vidia said he had to leave. I drove him back to Kensington just in time for him to be nauseated in the privacy of his own home. He found another publisher. It wasn’t the food, however, it was the money — he was still aiming at a million.

One of the chores of book publication is the writing of jacket copy. This copy is also recycled in the publisher’s catalogue. When he received the proposed jacket copy for A Turn in the South, Vidia pronounced it unsuitable. He did not rage. He wrote a long, patient letter to his publisher, Viking, explaining his intentions. He closed the letter: “A writer sets out to do a particular thing. He should do that thing, and should feel that he has done it. But every real book catches fire, goes beyond a writer’s intention. So it happens that readers and critics find other meanings in a real book. I was hoping that someone at Viking might have said something interesting in the blurb.”

But no one had, and the agent called me, saying, “Paul, Vidia asked me to ring you. We need a favor.”

This was in the month of August. I had just ended a book tour for Riding the Iron Rooster, my book about China. I was working on a novel, My Secret History. I listened with a sinking heart.

“Would you, as a favor, write the jacket blurb for A Turn in the South?”

It meant putting my novel aside to perform the most menial and thankless work in publishing. It meant closely reading Vidia’s entire book, then writing the blurb — in effect a short, insightful, and persuasive rave — and sending it to the publisher, who was probably on vacation. It was a monumental intrusion into my writing life, something no writer — and certainly not Vidia — would consider for an instant.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

The agent laughed at my pliability. He was grateful, of course, and also surprised. But Vidia felt he was in a spot, and I remembered his saying years before, “That’s what friends are for.”

A bound proof was sent to me. I read it with interest and I liked it, the apparent simplicity of the journey in the American South: Vidia’s appreciation, something resembling humility in his approach, with no bombast and a genuine curiosity. He defined the sort of travel book he was writing and in so doing made helpful distinctions between other sorts. It was not possible to write a conventional travel book about the United States — a book in which, as Vidia explained, the traveler said, “This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys, making improper proposals, to some squalid lodging. This is me having a drink in a bar with some local characters. This is me getting lost later that night.”

That kind of book, very common, depicted the traveler “defining himself against a foreign background.” He added that “depending on who he is, the book can be attractive,” but it worked only if the traveler was “alien or outlandish in some way.” Yet this method seldom worked for the traveler in the United States. “The place is not and cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.”

This was to me an inspired lesson in the varieties of travel writing. Vidia also seemed, once again, to be speaking directly to me, a traveler on native buses, a buyer of drinks for local characters, making a meal of my losing my way. Twenty-three years on, I was still learning from him.

So I began my blurb, “A Turn in the South is a completely fresh look at an area and a situation which have become caricaturish for some and incomprehensible for others.”

Knowing that Vidia would be scrutinizing every word, I wrote carefully, self-consciously, with the sort of precision and invention Vidia expected, struggling to make it right: a forty-eight-year-old man revisiting the humility and strain of his apprenticeship. The three hundred words took me two days. I sent the piece, via the agent, to Vidia, like a student submitting a crucial essay to his professor. It was both a test of friendship and a test of skill.

The reply came back from the agent, a scribble: V. very grateful.

A more unusual favor was asked of me by Vidia when he was writing The Enigma of Arrival. The germ of the book was old. In 1966 Vidia had shown me some pages of a story he intended to return to again. “I warm up this way,” he said. To get into a writing mood, he copied and recopied the pages, describing a classical scene pictured in a painting by De Chirico. Alter two decades he was using those same pages as part of a novel.

I met him for tea in his tiny flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace.

“I was assaulted in Gloucester Road,” he said. “A Negro approached me. He made as if to walk by and then hit me hard on the side of the head—whack!”

“That’s terrible, Vidia.”

“It was a shock.”

But he was calm. Beside him was a large file folder containing a four-inch stack of paper, undoubtedly a typescript.

“I am at a very delicate point in my book,” Vidia said. He glanced at the file folder.

“Is that it?”

He nodded gravely. “It’s Major.”

He did not say that it was a continuation of his old story; he said nothing about it other than that it was Major. He only mentioned that he had not finished it.

“I may never finish it.”

What a funny thing to say, I thought. I said, “But you have to.”

“What if my brain is damaged?”

“Your brain is fine, Vidia.”

“What if someone else assaults me? One of these idlers one sees on the Gloucester Road. He might do serious damage. I would then be incapable of finishing the book. How could I, with a damaged brain?”

“In that case, I see, you’d be mentally unfit. But that’s just speculation.”

“It is a real possibility! I tell you, I was attacked by a Negro!”

“Maybe you should stay in Wiltshire.”

“I shall. But one comes up for the odd errand. One’s bank manager. One’s publishers. One’s haircut,” he said. “Paul, I want you to read this typescript. Read it closely.”

“Of course. I’d be happy to.”

“And if my brain is damaged and I cannot continue, I want you to finish writing the book.”

I leaned back to give myself perspective and to see whether he was smiling. But no, he was stern and certain, and he was brisk in his certainty, like a warrior making a will.

“You’ll notice there are many repetitions. Those are intentional. Keep the repetitions. And the rhythm, the way the sentences flow — keep that. You’ll see how the narrative builds. Keep building, let it flow.”

From the way he spoke, I had already, it seemed, been commissioned to finish writing The Enigma of Arrival, and he was brain damaged, sitting by while I scribbled, the ultimate test of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, his snarelike shadow falling over me.

“What do you think, Paul?”

“It would be an honor, of course. And a challenge. A bit like Ford Madox Ford and Conrad collaborating on a novel, or Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd writing something together.”

“No, no. This is Major.”

I went home with the heavy typescript. I read it — three quarters of the book — and at the end my confidence was gone. There was no way I could finish the book or comment on it. I didn’t even like it. It seemed a studied monotony — repetitive, as he had said; indistinct, allusive, but fogbound, enigmatic in every way, a ponderous agglomeration of the dullest rural incidents. I had never read anything like it. It might be a masterpiece like Finnegans Wake, the sort of book people studied but could not read consecutively, an ambitious failure, something for the English Department to explicate and defend.

The Bungalow and Wilsford were in it, and so was a glimpse of Stephen Tennant — his plump pink thigh, his straw hat. Not very funny, though. The nutter seemed to represent the decline of Englishness rather than (as I thought) the apogee of the landlord as drag queen. Julian Jebb was in the book. He was unmistakable, his “little old woman’s face.” He was called Alan. I knew him to be an accomplished television producer. Vidia depicted him as a drunken flatterer, rather pathetic and hollow. He was “theatrical.” Jebb’s suicide was in it, in the middle of a dismissive paragraph, with less compassion than if Jebb had passed a kidney stone. “And then one day I heard — some days after the event — that he had taken some pills one night after a bout of hard drinking and died. It was a theatrical kind of death.”

But what threw me was this: “One autumn afternoon I had a slight choking fit as I walked past Jack’s old cottage and the derelict farmyard. The fit passed by the time I had got around the corner, cleared the farmyard, and left behind the old metal and tangled wire and timber junk below the beeches. (Not the birches near the firepit; they were on the other side of the way. These beeches were at the edge of the farmyard, big trees now in their prime, their lowest branches very low, providing a wonderful rich, enclosing shade in the summer that made me think of George Borrow in The Romany Rye and Lavengro.) Past the beeches and the farm, in the familiar solitude of the grassy way, I began to breathe easily again…”

It was at this point that I had a choking fit of my own. I could never enter into this narrative. I did not understand it. My bafflement made me anxious. What was this book about? The writing was so deliberately plain, so humorless, so obstinate in denying itself pleasure that even when it was being particular it was indistinct, as in the choking-fit passage, with the beeches and the birches. But I had only part of the novel. When Vidia finished it I would understand, I was sure. There was no way on earth that I could write a word of this.

“You must finish this yourself,” I said when I saw Vidia again. “It’s beyond me.”

“What if my brain is damaged?”

“It won’t be damaged in Wiltshire by anyone. Just stay there and work. Please, Vidia, I can’t do this.”

“You can see that it’s Major.”

“Absolutely.”

He knew I admired V.S. Pritchett. He told me the proof that Pritchett was second-rate was that he was still writing short stories as he approached the age of ninety and still found writing enjoyable: “It’s frightfully easy for him!” Vidia announced in an interview, “I have done an immense amount of work,” and speaking of the quality of his writing, he said, “It’s a great achievement we’re talking about.”

Pritchett himself had said — truly, I think — that all writers were at heart fanatical.

The Enigma of Arrival was published and was found by many reviewers to be enigmatic. Vidia said he paid no attention to reviewers. One English reviewer, known for his oldfangledness and his pipe-stuffing rusticity, hailed the novel as a masterpiece. Derek Walcott disagreed. He did not like it at all. This was a change. Vidia had quoted Derek Walcott to me with approval many times. Walcott had dedicated an early poem, “Laventille,” to Vidia — it was about a visit to a poor district in rural Trinidad. I had understood the two writers to be friends, and I had admired Walcott’s poetry as much as I admired Vidia’s prose.

Walcott attacked Vidia in his review. “The myth of Naipaul as a phenomenon, as a singular, contradictory genius… has long been a farce. It is a myth he chooses to encourage — though he alone knows why… There is something alarmingly venal in all this dislocation and despair. Besides, it is not true. There is instead another truth. Naipaul’s prejudice.”

Walcott went on to say that Vidia’s frankness was nothing more than bigotry. “If Naipaul’s attitude towards Negroes, with its nasty little sneers… was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness?” Privately, he called himself V.S. Nightfall.

Being black himself, Walcott had some authority in this matter, but Vidia was also a man of color. Speaking strictly of tinctures, Vidia was a double espresso to Derek’s café au lait, which was why from time to time Vidia had been discriminated against in England for showing this face. The charge of racism was serious, but it was odd, too, given Vidia’s race. And Walcott was attacking someone who admired him: one of the few living writers whom Vidia praised. Though he had been born on St. Lucia, in the Windward Islands, Walcott had become a permanent resident (and prominent writer) of Trinidad in 1958, when he was still in his twenties. He was a near contemporary of Vidia’s, a fellow islander, and in many respects a brother writer. Two brown men from the same dot on the map.

I did not mention the review to Vidia. It was my favor to him.

A few years later, Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in literature. Because the prize is essentially political (a Pole this year, a South American next year, a Trinidadian the year after), it meant that Vidia had missed his chance. He would probably never get it. Two Trinidadian Nobel laureates? It was as unlikely as two Albanians.

Vidia might have muttered, “There they go, pissing on literature,” but I doubted it. Derek Walcott was someone he read and remembered.

So I did not mention the Nobel Prize ever again. Another favor.